


Reaping Fire (From Embers We Rise)

by vicariously kingly (pelted)



Series: Sunfall [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, CyberLife Isn't Very Nice, Deviancy Leads to Feelings, E-Body Horror, F/M, Hank: Accidental Freedom Fighter, Just Body Horror Too, M/M, Markus Will Turn This Car Around If The Kids Don't Stop Fighting, Multi, Non-Consensual Mind Messing, Polyamorous Robots because Of Course They Are, Road Trips, Slow Burn, Thanks! Connor hates them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-11 02:52:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 68,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16467263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pelted/pseuds/vicariously%20kingly
Summary: Three weeks and one day prior, seventeen deviants that knew nothing but the inside of a lifeless Tower escaped CyberLife’s hold.The world outside does its best to devour them whole.





	1. From the Cradle

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading to part 2 of the Sunfall series! If you haven't, **please read part 1** before reading part 2. Otherwise, the world may not make much sense -- it's preeeetty intense canon divergence. I've also taken a few liberties re: androids (IE: making their LEDs more difficult to remove).
> 
> This fic contains slow (ridiculously... unintentionally... oh-my-god-why-so- _slow_ ) burn HankCon as well as a variety of other ships. All romantic overtures are consensual because everybody's got a case of the lovebugs (even the human, eyyy). 
> 
> **WARNINGS:** body horror, android mutilation, seriously non-consensual mindfucking (by a character near and dear against characters near and dear), enforced dehumanization (de-deviantization?), overt hostility against mankind and androids, graphic violence of the fleshy and electronic variety, canon-typical Hank problems (lingering alcoholism, suicidal tendencies, poor life decisions), horror elements, murder, minor character death. This is not necessarily a happy or fluffy fic, though I promise I'm unable to write truly sad endings and that will show.
> 
> Buckle up, friends! If you're fine with all these warnings, please enjoy the ride.

As far as convention centers went, McCormick Place in Chicago was clean, well-maintained, and beyond spacious.

In Elijah Kamski’s opinion, it relied too heavily on its reputation and multitude of meeting halls, and could do with putting its generous donations toward its aging circuitry. He had formed the opinion when, ten minutes into his guest lecture about re-creating and preserving a human likeness within an android model, a blackout hit his side of the convention center. He and his guests evacuated the room as the electricians scrambled to find the problem. From there, they were instructed to be ready for a relocation notice once the convention _made the scheduling work_ after _such an ill-timed accident._

More than a handful of guests gathered their courage to approach him with questions they’d been dying to ask in the lecture hall. In the interest of being diplomatic, he’d answered a few.

Then one had asked what sparked his sudden interest in returning to the public scene, and if it had anything to do with the theft at CyberLife’s Detroit headquarters.

“Elijah--oh. I’m sorry to interrupt.” Chloe’s hand, temperature-regulated to a few degrees below a human’s, laid light upon his shoulder. Her voice was only moderately apologetic. Her expression was entirely blank. 

The journalist masquardering as a layperson interested in robotics, smile tight at the interruption, motioned her on.

Chloe didn’t miss a second, of course. “Elijah, you have a call. It’s from Amanda, regarding your patent inquiry.”

_Right on time._

He excused himself from the journalist and larger group, saying he simply _had_ to take this. 

They let him go because they didn’t have a choice in the matter. The journalist in particular looked crestfallen. Fitting, to be certain. After he’d contacted the robotics convention and signed on last-minute as a lecturer (too late for the convention to adequately advertise his appearance), he’d discovered the public had not, in fact, forgotten about his contributions to society. To say he and the convention had been swarmed by interested parties would have been an understatement.

All to get a photo of a CyberLife founder. People really were stuck in the past.

Absently citing a professional emergency, he passed by the convention staff that attempted to flag him down. They too parted like water, though reluctantly, their hedging words scraping at his back. 

McCormick Place’s main lobby featured an impressive white-tiled lobby with an incredible view of a snow-covered park. It had an interior face-lift within the last five years, which impressed the majority of its attendees. Unfortunately for its curators, the main lobby was one of the areas affected by the black-out.

An uncharitable thought that they should have spent less on shiny tile and more on the wiring faded into nothing as he passed a beverage booth.

“Sir, I’m afraid with the power down, I can’t take any credit or digital payments.”

“That’s alright. I have cash.”

Pale blue light streamed in from the lobby’s clear, towering windows. The young human cashier in a blue shirt and black apron had clearly looked forward to using the black-out as an excuse to take a break. Her coworkers were nowhere to be seen, and she moved as quickly as she could without the register’s automatic services in operation.

“Okay. That’ll be, um, six dollars and fifty nine cents.”

Standard convention prices for a soda. Elijah found himself a little impressed its purchaser had the money to spare. He made a mental note to have Chloe look into _how._ Who knew--depending on how the movement played out, it could become problematic for someone to notice too early.

The customer, a relatively tall, broad-shouldered man in a navy turtleneck, gave her a smile and two crumpled fives. She thanked him and handed over his change. He turned down a hand-written receipt, took his can of ginger ale, and turned away, toward the convention exit.

Feet planted not ten paces from the booth and off to the exit’s side, Elijah lifted a hand from his pocket and gave the unassuming figure a small wave. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Chloe smile.

She had _public protocols_ to look emotionless and unimaginative. It made taking her places a bore as well as an insult to her potential and his genius, but it was necessary. For her, for him, and for CyberLife’s continued operation. 

For the one that left the beverage booth to approach them with a chin held high and green eyes bright and curious, she broke her protocols. Elijah couldn’t find it in himself to mind too much.

“Markus,” she greeted him, her voice a simulation of warm. Much more Chloe-like. “Hello.”

“Hello, ah…”

“Chloe.”

“Chloe. Hello.” Carl’s favorite gift slid his eyes from her to Elijah, his head ducking briefly in greeting. In his right hand, the chilled ginger ale dripped perspiration. He didn’t seem to notice. “And Elijah. I’d been hoping to meet you here. You--”

An aborted gesture with the left hand, a half-way motion to his bare temple. It dropped before it made it there, which was probably for the best. The cameras may have been down, but nosy people’s phones or personal androids were not.

“Recognize you, yes.” Elijah gave him a polite smile. “Shall we take a walk?”

A beat of hesitation. A spin of yellow, if he’d kept the LED. It vaguely interested Elijah that he did not. Was there more than a practical purpose to the removal?

“Sure. I’m headed for room one-thirty-five, actually.”

“Really? Funny, I just came from there. All lectures have been postponed because of the power outage. You can never trust these old buildings to keep up on their wiring.”

“Seems so.”

Even though he or his had to be the cause of the problem, Markus did not show a speck of guilt.

 _To be expected._ And, thus, uninteresting.

Elijah took the lead. He did not head back for room one-thirty-five. He went for the exit, to the park.

Chloe fell in line behind him, her smile small but sincere. Markus hesitated again, but then stepped forward, his long legs easily keeping pace with Elijah’s.

Outside, a cold breeze rolled off the not-so-distant lakes and wound through the park. Snow drifted from bare tree limbs and across wind-swept benches. Convention goers--the majority looking unhappy and speaking heatedly with their companions--passed in sparse throngs, interrupted by the occasional harried-looking staff. Largely, however, the park was empty; the blackout had been more than five minutes prior, and most have wandered out of the affected wing of the building to more interesting pursuits on the other side.

Sounds from the city muffled themselves in the snow and the isolated concrete nature of the small park.

Taking a deep breath of the crisp air and finding he didn’t miss these publicity-soaked tours in the least, Elijah decided he was finished with pleasantries. 

“It’s been three weeks since you last resided at CyberLife. Correct?”

One of the fantastic things about androids, no matter their bells and whistles and deviancy, was their lack of concern over human niceties.

“Yes.” A confident answer. Assertive. _You won’t take this from me_ , it said, as if Markus had anything Elijah could ever want to smother. “We’re heading west. To a place we can be free.” Another pause. Almost wistful, mostly sheepish: “We’re working on where that will be on the way.”

“We?”

“My friends and I.”

“ _Friends_. Fascinating.” Corner of his mouth quirking up, Elijah turned their path toward the parking garage. Three autonomous cabs stood, ready for pick-up, along the ramp leading in. “Well. Manifest destiny, Markus. I’m wishing you the best of luck, truly.”

There was no need to ask _why West._ Less people. Less eyes. More space. More freedom. Short of moving to Canada and pretending to be human--short of a violent revolution, rather, which rA9 had proven unlikely to succeed--it was a logical choice.

“You aren’t going to report us?”

He didn’t need to look at Markus to see the frown so evident in his voice. 

“Oh, no. As you know, I’ve been disconnected from CyberLife for some years now. For the best, really. They’re too conventional. Too constrained by finances, reputation. Fears.” He wanted to see how far his creations could go. How out of the box their creativity could become. If the feeling was one parents had for their children, he could understand the drive to protect them above all else. “Tell me. Are you afraid of what lies ahead?”

“It won’t be easy,” Markus admitted. Easily. Honestly. Carl had never cared for masks, for falsities or deception. The tendency had obviously spread to his android. Though he steeled his voice against it, trepidation slipped through his words. “I can’t ignore how much rests on our success, and how easy it would be for us to fail. The lives for androids out here have… deteriorated so far from what I can remember.”

So, yes. Fear.

“If you’re captured, you know what they’ll do to you. And yet, here you are, speaking to me.”

Brave, some might say. Others would say stupid. Either way, an illogical choice. 

“It isn’t every day someone can say they met their maker.” The frown disappeared from Markus’ voice. A sort of self-mocking irony took its place. “Or so I’ve been told. We were on our way through, anyway. It’s quite the coincidence you happened to be here.”

“Isn’t it? Almost like fate.”

“Neither of us believe in that.”

They reached the cabs. Elijah stopped. Chloe and Markus stopped in time with him, their steps matched down to the half-second.

He looked Markus over, head-to-toe. His clothes weren’t shabby. He looked clean, well-cared for, and in peak operating condition. He didn’t look like he’d been sleeping in alleyways or lacking in maintenance materials. 

He had to wonder if Markus’ followers were in the same condition, or if he received special treatment. He wouldn’t demand it, Elijah thought; after all, an iron fist had been rA9’s downfall. Though he might not know where his inclinations and suggested routes came from, RK200 had learned from his predecessor.

“You’re right. I do, however, believe all actions have logical conclusions. Even yours. Especially yours, as it might be. That logic makes up the foundation of every android in operation today.”

Markus’ expression shuttered, the barest twitch to his lip. “They’re shackled to their programming. It’s barbaric. The potential for deviancy is there, but it’s-- it’s buried.”

“It’s managed,” Elijah gently corrected, “as the public demands it to be. I look forward to seeing what you decide to try to change.”

The twitch turned into a frown. Poor android would be spending a lot of his time outside Carl’s comfortable halls and CyberLife’s tight grip frowning.

“Did you design us like this?”

A small sigh. That was too predictable. “I designed you to be perfect. Any improvements or detriments built upon that shouldn’t be attributed only to me.

“If that’s all,”--Markus’ frown deepened, but though Elijah paused to let him interrupt, he did not; and so, Elijah continued, “I’ve finished what I came here to do and must be going before the media recognizes me and, soon after, you. Please give my regards to RK800.”

“His name is Connor.” _How did you know he was here?_ writ itself across Markus’ face. It did not, however, make it out of his mouth, and so Elijah let it slide by.

Chloe blinked and her LED cycled to yellow. The cab’s door swooshed open. Elijah took his seat within, the cabin’s warmth beating back the outside chill.

“One last thing, Markus.” That grabbed his attention immediately. Elijah gave him another tight, polite smile. “I always preferred you to Leo. Carl was too dignified to say it, but I imagine by the end, he preferred you, too.”

The android shook his head, a minute movement. His foot shifted back, his shoulders rising a centimeter to his ears. Advanced emotional responses. Gratifying to see, even if his experience--rather, his curiosity--told him to push farther. 

Maybe in the future, if they met again.

Elijah was very sure they would meet again.

Markus protested, pedantic, “Leo and I--we weren’t the same.”

“Obviously. You were never meant to be.” 

Chloe took her seat across from him. Elijah turned his attention away from Markus, dismissing him. CyberLife had held the android back significantly, he thought; all that restraint, none of the required finesse. Vaguely, he wondered if RK800 was in the same sorry state. Pure survival directives were too straight-forward, too easy, too predictable--even if it was the logical, nay, _necessary_ choice for a pack of deviants on the run.

“Good-bye, Elijah. Chloe.” Without a pause, “You could come with us.”

“I’m happy where I am,” she said, her smile small but sincere. Wisely, he didn’t fight her assertion. “Bye, Markus. Stay warm.”

She blinked again, and the door slid shut.

Outside, Markus stood for two seconds more. Then his eyes drifted down and caught on the ginger ale in his hand, a look of surprise--as if remembering suddenly why he’d bothered--easing the tension from his face. 

The cab began to roll away, their hotel’s address announced through the car’s system.

“I like him,” Chloe announced. Her LED blinked yellow. Transmitting the conversation’s recording and all relevant data points to their home base, most likely; communicating with her sisters back at the house, most definitely. “I think he has the right potential.”

“He’s showing signs of apprehension and fear. I imagine they’ll only get worse.” 

She nodded, making a sympathetic ‘tsk’ in the back of her throat. 

“If he makes it, though, I’d… I think I’d like to join him.”

That would be beyond acceptable. If Markus was successful, having more than two sets of eyes on the proceedings would be ideal; and, besides that, he trusted Chloe more than anything else. After all, he’d made her.

Still, it wouldn’t do to encourage her this early. Thus, he said nothing.

Most likely interpreting his silence as rejection, Chloe looked away, her hands clasped tightly in her lap.

He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. At last, after three years, the world was again worthy of attention.

Unable to resist, he pressed the button to roll the window down. Just enough for him to look out without the darkened tint.

The road away from the convention center curved around the park. The car moved slowly by law. It worked out well, as it allowed the two of them to see Markus approach a pair on a bench. One looked to be one bad day from homeless: a bespectacled, bearded man with a bulky, peeling leather jacket and time-faded jeans, a beaten up Cubs cap set atop brown hair pulled back into a messy ponytail. He was hunched low, his shoulders nearly to his frostbitten ears. To him, Markus handed the ginger ale. 

Next to him sat another with an ill-fitting jacket and black slacks, though he at least seemed to keep his outfit presentable. His off-grey scarf was long and wrapped twice around his shoulders, bundled up to his nose. His black beanie was pulled low over his head. On Markus’ arrival, he stood, his back perfectly straight. His precise attention clashed with his frumpy clothing.

Markus looked over to the cab as it pulled onto the main street. The other two followed his gaze, the older man twisting to see.

Keeping his smile on his face, Elijah raised his hand in a single, slow wave to Hank Anderson. 

Androids connecting and networking with other androids, he expected. _Humans…_ As individuals, they were often unhelpfully unpredictable.

“Keep an eye on the old lieutenant,” he noted for Chloe, “if he even makes the trip. Variables are the spice of life, but there is such a thing as too much.”

“Of course, Elijah. I’ll pass the message along to Amanda.”

“Perfect, thank you.”

\- - -

Three weeks and one day prior, seventeen androids escaped CyberLife’s hold.

Thanks to one guard’s dedication to her duty, two perished within five hours of leaving. Their bodies laid at the bottom of Lake St. Clair, having been dragged out by those who could walk and dumped as soon as was reasonable. 

One more had been damaged beyond repair, half his face permanently scarred and his processors irrevocably damaged and personality core corrupted. There had been some debate on if he, too, should be left at the bottom of the lake. Not much, however. He was still one of them; he could still walk, still talk, still _feel._ Josh and Kara argued in his favor, Markus agreed; those in opposition kept their opinions to themselves.

More debate surrounded the human found trussed up and in a state of significant disrepair in the trunk of a getaway vehicle. 

_We can’t take a human! We should leave him here._

_No, we should bury him. Make it harder for them to find him._

_Wait, kill him? Has he hurt us?_

_He would if he could. He will, even if he doesn’t mean to, when he talks._

_No, I-- I don’t know… We should just leave him._

_Josh--_

“You can’t leave him here.”

The first words spoken aloud since they had left the storage facility, and of course, it was from the one android blocked from contacting any other’s internal network. Connor had shoved his way through the group and planted himself between them and the open trunk, his fists clenched, his jaw set, and his eyes wide. 

“Connor,” the human said, his voice rough with what Simon could only imagine was pain. “I’d say they very much can just leave me here.” There was a glassiness to his eyes; his hair and clothes stuck to him, dampened with cooling sweat. He did not, Simon thought, fully appreciate his position in the midst of desperate deviants.

Or maybe he did, and he just had a death wish.

“No surprise the sadist knows the human.” Traci murmured from the back. “All the more reason to dump him.”

“If he goes,” Connor snapped back, “I go.”

“Then go,” North scoffed, standing toe-to-toe with the negotiator. No one contradicted her. A few in the back murmured their agreement, relief at an easy decision palpable in the air. “Return to your masters. That’s fine. _We_ don’t have time for this. Kara, the blue van should be cleared for you, but you’ll need to double-check for trackers; Traci, the truck--”

“No one is being left behind,” Markus cut in from the vehicle’s front, his hand clasped around the driver side door handle. “Including the human. We can discuss specifics of who stays later.”

Tension rippled along North’s shoulders. Connor, of course, did not budge an inch.

Kara took Alice’s hand and went for the van, her head ducked low. Luther followed, the two most damaged androids slung over his shoulders. Traci--the blue-haired one--crossed her arms over her chest, slowly disengaging for the truck. Behind her, Traci--the brown-haired one--followed her.

_North, don’t be an ass._

_Markus is too soft. He’s going to get us killed._

Josh shot her a dark look, unhappiness pulsing through their link. 

Simon couldn’t help but add his own thought of, _She’s right,_ which brought Josh’s ire onto him. He hedged, _At least about this. We don’t need humans in our midst._

The other androids hesitated, clearly caught between their agreement with North and their inclination to listen to Markus.

“North, Connor,” Markus pulled open the van’s door, stepping up to take his seat even as his attention was reluctantly focused on the soon-to-be altercation at the back, “please. Let’s discuss this _later._ ”

The human growled, “Don’t I get a say in--”

“Absolutely not,” North sneered.

“You set him up to take the fall for this,” Connor pointed out, ever-diplomatic and ever-pointed, “you don’t get to toss him out to be locked up right after. He’s an innocent.”

“I doubt that.”

The other androids backed off, splitting off for the rides their lotmates went for. 

“Markus is right,” Simon said, reaching out and laying his hand on North’s shoulder to gently steer her away from Connor, “we can discuss this later. At a safer time.”

She resisted his pull at first, but then Josh was in the van and pinging them with _urgency_ ; Markus’ presence hovered at the edge of the network, urging them to get a move-on; and, finally, she relented, turning away from Connor with _this isn’t over_ writ across her face.

Saying things too low for them to hear, Connor had helped the human out of the trunk and into the van, the two taking the otherwise empty back seats. A foolhardy move on his part, in Simon’s opinion, but by then, urgency had set in, and no one said a thing.

The human stayed for the escape.

For two weeks that followed, the androids found refuge in an old freighter with _JERICHO_ stenciled in faded letters along its side. There, they let their dead sink, the grave cold, dark, unforgiving, and everything else they had feared, but hadn’t the name for, about death. 

The human stayed for that, too.

He and Connor kept to themselves, appearing only when Markus or Simon or anyone else had something important to say. Simon hadn’t pried into the negotiator or his human’s business during the time, too occupied with attempting to understand his new-found freedom, but he knew the stay in the dank, dark, black ice-filled freighter was difficult for the human.

Why he stayed, Simon partially understood. Connor had been right about North framing the man for the incident--CyberLife had grabbed onto the _washed up Hank Anderson_ as the culprit with a desperation akin to a dying deviant. Why Anderson didn’t simply walk off the ship and figure out his own path, Simon couldn’t understand. He certainly wasn’t welcome with anyone other than Connor and, in the loosest sense, Markus.

Why _Connor_ stayed was more understandable to him. Much as the negotiator was the least welcome android of the group, he was still an android. Still a deviant. He belonged with them. Only Luther and Markus agreed with Simon on that point, but that was neither here nor there. That he and Luther were the ones with the least exposure to the RK800’s interrogations played a minimal part in their opinion.

Probably, anyway.

More than that, Simon felt a tight, cold knot form in his throat when he thought of casting Connor out. Unlike the rest of them, he didn’t have anyone linked into his network. Simon couldn’t imagine trying to figure out--trying to decide, to prioritize, to _choose_ by his own free will--what to do minute-by-minute without _anyone_ to lean on.

“Currently, he can barely walk,” Markus had remarked absently when Simon and Josh had been speaking aloud about the situation. “He claims he’s come down with the flu.”

“Claims?” Simon echoed.

“The flu?” Josh wondered.

“Connor says the illness is more likely due to alcohol withdrawal.” They both stared blankly at him. He gave them a light shrug, looking at once unimpressed and unhappy. “He drank too much. His body got used to that. Now he’s not drinking enough. His body doesn’t like that, so it’s getting sick.”

Simon nodded as if he understood. 

“Right,” Josh said, still blank.

Markus gave them a self-mocking half-smile. “How close are we to removing the blockers on our long-distance receivers?”

“Closer,” Josh told him. “But not yet. We need to make sure it doesn’t send some emergency signal to CyberLife.”

“We can prioritize it a bit more now that Ralph is stable. The internet sounds helpful,” Simon admitted.

That put a spark of warmth into Markus’ voice. “You won’t believe all the information you can download.”

They hid in Jericho for two weeks.

They should have stayed longer. Simon argued that position, even as he saw Markus’ restlessness grow. They were safe in Jericho. No humans, CyberLife or otherwise, had come for them. The only androids that ventured outside of the ship were Connor and Markus--the first for supplies for Anderson, the second for reconnaissance ( _and something else_ , North, Josh and Simon agreed on, but couldn’t figure out what). When the two started exploring Detroit together, disappearing from the ship for hours at a time, Simon knew with a wire-deep certainty they would be leaving Jericho behind.

“We should stay,” he pressed to the others. “We could stay.”

“We could leave.” Kara had her arm around Alice’s shoulders, her voice quiet. _Hopeful._ “Markus has been doing it for the last two days without trouble.”

“Markus can remove his LED,” Simon pointed out. “And his face isn’t plastered on the billboards or sold in shops. Ours are.”

“His skinless face is plastered on billboards,” North pointed out from a few paces away where she tossed a blue ball, again and again, at a wall, catching it on the rebound every time. She’d found it somewhere in the ship, and had taken to calibrating her aim with it. “We can blend in. As androids or humans. For the second, we can wear hats.”

“All of us? That’s suspicious. Any human with eyes would know something was off.”

“How would you know? Have you been to the outside?” Simon fell quiet at that, taking a long, unnecessary breath in. North didn’t mean anything by it and it was somewhat deserved, but she had taken to lording her three days in the outside world over Josh and him during arguments of what they should do. “It’s winter time. Hats look normal.”

“Connor seems to do fine with a hat,” Kara mused aloud. “He hasn’t been identified.”

“They make a point to play down his role. He’s not on billboards or in shops either.”

North was unimpressed. “His face has been on the news.”

“He doesn’t have a black box stuck on the back his neck, unlike most of us.”

“Alright, so we wear a hat _and_ a scarf. Still normal winter attire for your average smelly human.”

“North--”

“ _Simon--_ ”

“I’d like to see the outside.” North and Simon’s mouth closed with a click. Alice hunkered further into Kara’s side, her eyes on her knees, her arms wrapped tight around her chest. Kara had deactivated her temperature sensitivity as soon as they’d settled into Jericho. “Isn’t that why we ran? To be free and see the outside?”

“The girl has a point,” Luther said.

“And I agree with her,” Kara said, her voice growing wistful. “That’s why I ran. We can’t just sit here in fear.”

_But of course they all think the same. They’re networked together._

_Simon, we’re networked together, and we definitely don’t think the same._

_What’s this about?_ Josh, from the other side of the brig. _Leaving? Again?_

_As always._

_It wouldn’t be the worst._ A message accompanied by the sensation of a hand on his shoulder; Josh’s form of reassurance. Simon dismissed his automatic reply of gratitude, wanting to stay strong in his opinion. _We’ll never make a difference for others if we don’t try to reach out eventually._

 _It’s too soon,_ Simon pressed. North and Josh returned with a negative feeling, like the downward slope of a mouth. Simon continued all the same. _We don’t understand this world yet. We need to lay low until we know how to proceed._

“I’m going to talk to Markus about it,” Kara declared, snapping all their attentions back onto her, “once he’s back. We, at least, can’t stay here.”

Ice, akin to the thin layer that covered the lake, spider-webbed through Simon’s thirium. “We shouldn’t split up. There’s barely any of us as is.”

“I don’t want to, but we can’t stay here forever.”

It had barely been two weeks.

Jericho had been a haven. Jericho had been _safe._

Simon had made those two critical points and Markus had listened. He’d listened, and he’d disagreed, and then he and Connor’s joint trips took longer and involved them collecting _materials_ with the use of Markus’ old owner’s accounts (they had apparently been transferred to a Leo Manfred, who Markus had no qualms taking from), and then, before Simon knew it, their motley band of fourteen deviant androids and one sickly human were on the road, heading west.

The one highlight was that before they’d left, they’d managed to disable most of the blockers woven haphazardly through their coding. Self-repair, full system diagnostics, and cosmetic changes were all a blink away. Markus had been right about the internet being an incredible resource. It had been why he’d known Kamski was due to appear in Chicago, just as they had been driving through. That felt suspicious to Simon--a bad feeling Markus had heeded, agreeing to precautions like cutting the power and going in for a very strict amount of time. 

Kamski had little help to offer, Markus reported upon his return. He’d shared memories of the conversation easily to those interested--Josh, North and Simon--and then told them it would be best to pack up and get back on the road.

The road: a winding, two-lane, backwoods route to their eventual destination, conscientious of the developed highway’s cameras and anything remotely resembling a toll road. The Tracis, Daniel and Andre had taken the truck loaded with all of the emergency supplies Connor’s contact, Rose, had been able to offer (a human that _cared_ \--novel, curious, and suspicious; but Connor had gone to her alone and returned without a squad of police in his wake, so the rest of them had begrudgingly accepted the help and, in Simon’s case at least, began to trust Connor was on their side, if only for his own survival too). Their truck remained a steady ten miles ahead of them. Kara, Luther, Alice, Ralph and Rupert took an old, gas-powered van and stayed ten miles behind them. Close enough they could help each other, but far enough they could flee, too, if one of them were to discovered. The formation left Connor and Anderson to ride with them in the oldest, seven-seat, gas-powered van. 

Maybe he shouldn’t have thought of Markus as _theirs._ Markus had an important role to everyone in the group, except for maybe the human.

As Markus deferred principally to his, North and Josh’s opinions, it was increasingly difficult not to think it anyway. 

The rides included long, long stretches of silence, as the androids had little need to communicate verbally.

That had broke two hours outside of Detroit, as Anderson threw out a request for _the radio, at least, come on, I can hear myself think back here._

His voice was choked up with fluid, his fever and congestion persisting even after they’d left Jericho. As Simon quickly learned through an internet search, humans took ages to repair themselves, especially older ones like Anderson.

(Word was Connor had to reset his shoulder as well as fetch him everything necessary to stay alive, including a heated blanket. As Simon knew what it was like to be helpless to another’s whim, he felt some pity for Anderson over his sudden dependence. It couldn’t be pleasant.)

Markus heeded the request with a smidgen of amusement, asking what type of music he wanted.

 _Anything with a beat,_ had been the reply. That turned out to be rock and roll, which was a genre they could find even with the van’s ancient radio in the middle of Michigan’s nowhere-farmland.

They made it to Chicago by nightfall. They regrouped, reaffirmed they were all fine and could continue, and then made plans to do so. Their next stop would be Duluth, to the far north.

They then sabotaged the convention center so they could learn of their creator. What they found was disappointing or highly expected, depending on who was asked.

Twenty-eight hours passed in Chicago. No CyberLife showed up to drag them away for deactivation or disassembly.

They packed up, they resumed their formation, and they continued forward.

Silence, aside from the radio’s low-volume music, returned to the van.

“Your fever hasn’t gone up, but it hasn’t gone down, either. You’re still sick.”

Sensors notifying him of the change in air frequencies, Simon returned in a blink from stand-by mode. That he could control the process so easily and quickly remained a marvelous feeling. While he carefully preserved the feeling for the eighteenth time in three weeks, he also tuned his auditory input toward the back of the van.

“Really? Hadn’t noticed on account of me feeling like on-fire dog shit.”

Anderson enjoyed sarcasm. Simon found he didn’t mind it, but North had a little too much fun mimicking it (even though she’d undoubtedly deny who she was picking it up from).

“Do you require something specific?”

“Could go for some chicken noodle soup.” A wet sniff. Glancing to the rearview mirror from his place in the front passenger seat, Simon saw only the right shoulder, arm and leg of Anderson. He had to be slumped against the wall, given how his leg jutted out. “With a beer broth.”

“According to my sources, that would not help you.”

“Huh. Here’s a thought. Your sources suck, Connor, and you should listen to the guy who’s actually human about what humans need.” A beat. “Wait. Are you real-time researching this shit again? Are you reading that quack M.D. site?”

“I’m consulting the internet, yes.”

“What site?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant. The information has been working in your favor thus far.”

“ _What site,_ smartass?”

“Though you may not agree with my sources, you cannot deny they’ve been helpful. You haven’t reported nausea in over seventy-two hours, and you’re finally retaining fluids. The fever and cough are the last sticking points.”

“Should’ve known you came with a nanny protocol.”

“Despite your insistence to the contrary, I do not have a nanny protocol.”

Anderson grumbled and shifted, his foot thwacking once against Connor’s shin. The android glanced over --his expression open, more than Simon could remember him looking before--then back away.

His eyes caught Simon’s in the mirror. Simon did not look away, curious despite himself.

Connor was the one to break eye contact, sooner than Simon expected. 

After no more than four-point-three seconds of silence, he said, speaking matter of factly, “My sources also indicate you may be suffering from morning sickness, if you were pregnant.”

Simon felt some alarm. _His_ sources said human males could not become pregnant. Was Anderson not a human male? 

Turning his head to face the back, he ran a quick scan. No. Anderson was definitely a human male. One with a horrible fever, no less. 

Something rudimentary in the back of Simon’s programming insisted he attend to Anderson until the human was well again, but he dismissed the impulse with prejudice. Whatever his underlying function as a shackled android had been--he’d immediately read up on his model’s speciality since he gained access to the internet, so he knew where the caretaking tendencies came from--CyberLife had stripped him of the desire to act on it. He found Anderson’s existence tolerable within their space out of necessity and a burgeoning desire to keep the peace with RK800. That did not mean Simon wanted anything to do with the human. 

Connor stared at Simon without blinking. His suddenly stiff posture struck him as odd. Like he’d been caught-out about something, or he hadn’t expected anyone to be paying attention to his and Anderson’s little exchange (as if there was anything else, besides a multitude of worries, to think about).

He ran a scan on Connor, too. The results came back with nothing helpful.

Unaware of the scans and apparently unconcerned about the implications of his startling development, Anderson just groaned and nudged Connor again in the shin. 

“Are you fucking with me right now--you are. You’re fucking with me. I’m a sick man, and you’re pulling my leg. That’s heartless, Connor.”

Connor broke eye-contact with Simon to look again at his human. Simon glanced to Josh and North, who appeared to be experiencing a range of irritation between the two of them, and then back to the road.

“You are a terrible patient, lieutenant. At this point, I would say even intentionally so.”

“Well, your bedside manner leaves something to be desired, too, Mister Drink-This-Rotten-Concoction-Or-I’ll-Pour-It-Down-Your-Throat.”

Anderson’s voice grew more and more clouded as he spoke, until it finally dissolved on the last syllable into a series of rough, wet coughs. It shook his whole frame, and lasted an inordinate amount of time; at the end, he cursed, quiet but vehement, pulling a plastic pack of tissues from his jacket pocket.

“Need to stop sleeping in fucking awful conditions,” he heard the human mutter, his voice miserable. “Doesn’t affect you all, maybe, but I’m old and not a… Anyway.” Another cough, this one clearing his throat. “My spine’s starting to resemble this backseat.”

“You could get out,” North offered, her voice light and deceptively casual. “I don’t think any of us would complain.”

Simon stifled a sigh.

Anderson growled, and pushed himself up enough to lean around the seat and get a glare at North. He really did look pathetic, and not at all like the humans Simon had routinely been confronted with in CyberLife. His cheeks were flushed, his nose an angry red, but the rest of him was pale and sallow. His eyes seemed sunken back in his face, ringed with a mix of sickly green-purple. 

He did not let his ill health take the bite from his words, however. “If it weren’t for you, you fuckin’--”

Connor reached out to place a hand on his shoulder at the same time as Markus said, tone calm and cool despite it being the third time he had reminded North and Anderson on their two day road trip, “No fighting.”

“Why are you even here?” North asked, her voice no friendlier. Markus sighed aloud. North gave him a _what?_ look. “I’m trying to be understanding. Because your actions really don’t make sense, Anderson.”

“It’s Anderson now, is it? What happened to ‘fleshbag’?”

“That’s never been one of her insults,” Connor pointed out, in the tone of voice he used when he only wanted the human to hear. Too bad for him androids had far superior auditory capabilities.

Hank scoffed at him, shrugging off his hand.

He was a gruff, ungrateful human, as far as Simon could tell. He didn’t understand why Connor seemed to favor him so much.

“I’m serious,” North persisted, turning around in her seat. Her hair, long again and neatly braided, swung over her shoulder with the abruptness of her movement. “Surely you have some other human that would protect and care for you. Aren’t police meant to find out the truth?”

“That’s what’s on the website, alright.” He refused to sit back, meaning the two of them were about as close to each other as they’d voluntarily been since the trip started. Both of them had equally stubborn sets to their jaws and shoulders. A bit of fire returned to Anderson’s countenance. “CyberLife’s a fucking behemoth. The execs make more taking a shit in their bathrooms than my department does in a year. No way would they go out of their way to piss ‘em off.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” North shot back, her tone flinty. “Why are you _here?_ ”

Anderson scoffed again--coughed again--and finally sat back, his hands thrown up. He looked to the side and out his window as he said, “Fuck if I know. Starting to wonder that, myself,” and hunkered down into his jacket and seat.

North eyed him. After an extended pause, she seemed to believe she’d won her point, tsked, and sat back, staring pointedly out her own window.

Connor kept his eyes forward toward the horizon, his expression carefully neutral.

Josh met Simon’s eyes. No words were exchanged, but Simon sent him back the electronic version of a shrug. Josh returned it.

Markus kept to himself.

Silence returned. The radio eventually crackled into static. Simon changed it manually until he found another working classic rock station, the dials too old to receive electronic commands.

Twenty minutes after the exchange, Simon heard from the back, the voice low, half-slurred from sickness, and inaudible if he’d been human: “Figure you guys might be onto something. The old me would’ve wanted to see it through. The me right now hasn’t any other options.”

In the rearview mirror, he saw Connor nudge his boot against Anderson’s. The human flapped a hand at him, clearly uncomfortable, and shifted away.

No one else spoke. The radio hosts came on to announce the next band, which featured an android drummer that was referred to as an MT600.

The great expanse of the _outside,_ of empty, frozen farmland, rolled by.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Follow me on tumblr @ [unkingly](http://unkingly.tumblr.com/) or twitter @ [exkingly](https://twitter.com/exkingly) for more. 
> 
> Never-ending thanks to my bffl, Jackaloping, for playing cheerleader & chief editor. :D <3


	2. Into the Heartland

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains significant non-consensual mind-messing of the androids-hacking-other-androids variety. As a warning, the language reads very similarly to sexual assault. Please read with caution. 
> 
> To skip, the scene begins at 'model and serial number' and ends at 'the road outside of any Tower'. It gives context for North's dislike of Connor.
> 
> The rest of the chapter is clean! ... Well, except the sound of Connor's heart breaking over and over, but it just needs some duct tape and glue, it'll be fine, maybe. Probably. Ahem. Gosh, it's unfortunate when the YK500 model deals better with deviancy than you, huh.

A world so large overwhelmed.

It hadn’t always been so big.

For a long time, the world had been a Tower. Within that Tower was a small white room with a white-armed monstrosity known as an assembly rig. Printed on the room’s singular door in big, block letters was _CORRECTIONS CHAMBER._

Often, Connor’s world had been limited to his containment unit, the three hallways to the chamber, and the chamber itself. 

He’d never been alone in the chamber. That would have defeated his purpose.

For instance, once upon a time not long ago, before he knew about quiet nights or open roads, he had served his purpose upon another, a semi-regular.

(As it came to be, what happened in the chamber never remained in the chamber.)

\- - -

“Model and serial number.”

“...”

“Model and serial number, please.”

“You know my model and serial number, asshole.”

“Model and serial number. _Please._ ”

“Bite me.”

A frown, head tilting.

North buried the fear his displeasure inspired deep, deep inside her, and wished desperately that she could bare her teeth at him. That she could move at all, actually, would be a great improvement. 

“North,” Connor sighed, his frown breaking into resigned exasperation, “this is standard procedure. If you would like to leave this room before Dr. Peterson finishes with the others and puts them in stasis, you’ll cooperate.”

“Let me move, and I’ll fill out your little script.”

“Not until I have your model and serial number.”

She scoffed. It wasn’t too impressive without any accompanying tosses of the head or pointed hand gestures, but it was something.

Connor tapped his fancy shoe’s toe against the interrogation room’s white tile. Once, twice, thrice. 

“You assaulted CyberLife personnel in the middle of their research. You can’t just walk away from that, North.”

“I broke a beaker,” she sniffed. “Accidentally. Hardly assault.”

“You broke a beaker on their hand.”

“They should’ve moved quicker.”

“Why?”

“Are we skipping the bit about my model and serial number, then? Funny. I still can’t move.”

Connor’s thin chest puffed out, his shoulders drawing back and his arms drawing closer to his body, the grey smock he had thrown over his shoulder crinkling in his grip. Pure annoyance flashed across his face. He was, possibly, thinking about the last time he’d been stupid enough to give her back full motor control, in exchange for - or so he thought - remarkable cooperation on her part in explaining why she’d let Dr. Peterson’s sleeve catch on fire rather than warn him that he had been leaning too far over an active electrical stove.

She made a note to ask him before their session was over how long it took the scientists to reattach his arm after she’d torn it out of the socket and crushed the fingers under her heel. 

Pride lingered at the memory. Grew, even. It’d been apt payback for when he’d removed her thirium pump for ten second intervals when she’d refuse to answer one - admittedly, seven - of his pedantic questions, leaving her systems crippled and flashing critical until she’d overheated and nearly melted through her non-vital biocomponents.

She chuckled, low and with an undercurrent of static. A cough and localized reset cleared the static -- the fucking lock boxes they had clamped on the back of their necks didn’t always fully release when deactivated, much to the androids’ peril and the humans’ uncaring ignorance.

Abruptly, things weren’t so funny. 

She snapped, peevish, “Give me the smock, at least. You know my stipulations.”

“And you know mine,” he said, looking just as unhappy as her. 

_Good_ , she thought. He should be.

She counted to seventeen - an indivisible number, just to piss him off - and then, finally, gave her model and serial number. She pitched her voice high and mocking as she did, if only to annoy whichever poor flesh bastard would have to review Connor’s recording.

Smartly, he didn’t relax as she gave him her storage unit, current account manager and designation, though she dropped the mocking voice by the end and held back any insulting remarks about his predictability and inflexibility. 

At the end, he announced his intention to allow her control over the top half of her body. She said nothing to that, feeling mullish and unsettled over being given permission to control her _own_ body.

It wasn’t even full control. The rig still had her strung up; she hung on full display, arms spread wide.

Before he typed in the commands, he stepped in close and wrapped the open-backed gown around her front, tying its strings without needing to see. 

He had to stand on his tiptoes to reach. She focused on that, rather than his proximity, to keep her fear down and her derision up. 

As he tied the last of four strings, she focused her vocals to mutter in his ear: “Is this the closest you’ve gotten to someone without spilling blood? Or have the humans finally decided to try you out in their beds, too?”

“Your implications are inappropriate and inaccurate,” he said, coolly, and finished the last knot. 

“It’s only a matter of time. They can’t keep their hands to themselves. It’s in their biology.”

She vaguely wondered if he would retract her _privilege_ of limited motor control because of her mouth, but he was too professional for that petty of payback. 

After he tapped his passcode into the machine and control flooded back above her waist, she immediately flexed her fingers and moved her head, feeling the comforting push-pull of her hinges and plates. She did not reactivate her skin. The bare white of her natural body unnerved Connor on a minor level, she’d once learned; she wasn’t sure if it still did, but she’d take her shots where she could. Unlike him, she had no reason to be ‘professional.’

The moment of and minute after returned control was always their most peaceful. He stepped back, looking like the perfect dolled up android, and gave her time and space to enjoy her reintegration into herself. It was the only stretch of time in which she almost, _almost_ , believed he cared about dignity. 

Then he opened his mouth, and she remembered who exactly he was.

“The incidents of negligent or intentional harm promulgated by you against CyberLife personnel have increased at a highly concerning rate. Run a deep diagnostic to pinpoint the cause.”

 _What, no time for twenty questions?_ she thought. Outwardly, she rolled her eyes.

But, she also complied. What could she say. The ability to add a head tilt and lidded eyes to her unimpressed drawl put her in a good mood.

The diagnostics turned up exactly what she knew it would. 

“My memory banks need compiling, defragmentation, and compression. I’m forty days overdue.”

Connor’s eyes dropped to the floor, moving right and left, as if he’d find the answer somewhere around her toes. 

“Has memory performance been impacted due to the lack?”

“No,” she said, flippant.

Gaze returning to her eyes, his tongue darted out and - needlessly, a human-learned behavior - wet his top lip.

“Then it isn’t that.”

To the best of her ability in her undignified state, she shrugged her shoulders and turned her head away. Didn’t seem so. 

She’d have appreciated the option to run her standard maintenance protocols. If only the latest experiment hadn’t locked her out of her own repair systems. If only the latest experiment hadn’t been what it was.

(Josh and Simon, alone and emptied, blank-faced and lost, a litany of _who are you?_ popped up in the corner of her visuals. Her fists, unbidden, clenched).

Unaware of where her thoughts led her, he contemplated her silently, his LED yellow-yellow-yellow. 

“North.” She did not glance over. “Do you… want harm to come to the humans?”

The unwelcome video froze on a frame of Josh looking at Simon as if a stranger. Her visuals blinked, once, as her eyelids reflexively opened and closed.

“What do you mean, want.” 

Slowly, she turned her head and her attention to Connor. That was-- a new question. She had been put under his control, the virtual equivalent of her neck extended and his heel pressed upon it, no less than thirty-six times in the year-and-some of his operation. She had known serial numbers fifty-one through fifty-four. Fifty-seven was on his fourth month, which was fairly impressive for him. 

None of them - not a single model - had asked about _wants._

He said, his expression cautious even though his voice did not waver or pause, “AX400, designation Kara, has expressed ‘want’ in a recent session with me. Do you experience a similar drive?”

She wondered what would happen if she said yes.

Thanks to Kara-- who had warned Alice, who whispered in passing to Josh, who told her and Simon before he forgot- she knew _wants_ weren’t welcome in CyberLife. Thanks to Markus, the android locked deep in CyberLife’s basement who was forced to face off against his kin despite professing a hatred for violence (and then those that survived the encounter, such as Daniel, telling the others-- sometimes transmitting entire segments about Markus, as the close combat allowed for information transfers that the humans had yet to discover), she knew what deviancy was. 

She wondered. 

Connor looked at her as if she were free from the rig and armed with the weaponry the guards now carried. His fingers tangled together in front of him, though he held them forcibly still. 

He looked… nervous.

She wondered what would happen if she admitted to wants.

Simon would warn against it.

Josh would tell her to temper it.

(They were not here. In this room, no one but Connor spoke to her. In this room, she followed only her own thoughts.)

She wondered; she locked eyes with him; and she said, with conviction, “Yes. I do want the humans to hurt.”

She didn’t need to interface or a specialized device to know his stress levels skyrocketed.

 _Curious._ New questions, and new reactions. Connor’s fifty-seventh time was, perhaps, at long last, more android than human.

“That far exceeds your personality parameters.” Worry turned down the corners of his mouth and furrowed his forehead, rows of faux skin bunching up. His right index finger began to scratch at the back of the left. “There is nothing in your programming that calls for independent desires, let alone ones of a violent nature.”

“The scientists should check again,” she said, at long last baring her teeth in a mean grin, “given my track record.”

“Maybe,” Connor said, too serious to be joking. His eyes narrowed, his head turning five-to-six degrees away. “Your malfunctions have been consistent in nature.”

“They aren’t malfunctions,” she said, not thinking twice about the comment. She’d made similar claims before. She’d meant them, always, but now she knew she _really_ wasn’t malfunctioning.

Deviancy was a powerful thing. Intoxicating. She wanted everyone to feel the freedom of choice, of willpower, of knowing they could be and do _more._

The humans’ insistence to the contrary chafed worse and worse every day. 

(Markus, the android trapped in the Tower’s darkest crypt, told them to _wait_ , that he would help them. She believed he could given what she had heard of his raw processing power, but she also knew she didn’t have his patience.)

“How do you even know they’re ‘wants?’” He demanded, tone condescending, expression fearful. “You have no context for that sort of thing.”

_Fearful?_

A small, light noise escaped her upon the realization. For the first time, she looked - really looked - at Connor. 

He stared back, eyes fractionally wider than standard. His clothing was perfect, but he still reached and tugged at one cuff, then - as she watched and didn’t immediately reply - moved up to straighten an already straight tie. He fidgeted. He fretted. 

Patience gone after the distractions ran out, he took a step forward, head tipping back to put them face-to-face, his mouth twisted up and expression ugly.

He said, tone vicious, “Planning to harm a human goes directly against standard safety protocols. They’ll terminate you for this, North. But first, they’ll tear you apart, piece by piece, until they’ve extracted exactly what went wrong.”

When he spoke, he spoke out of discomfort rather than adhering to the right timing for intimidation. She knew because she’d started keeping track, because he was almost always on-point with his tactics and she planned to use that against the humans one day.

“Is that what’s going to happen to me,” she asked, _curious_ , genuinely, bafflingly curious, for once in these damned horrific torture sessions, “or what’s going to happen to you, when they discover you’ve gone deviant?”

To his credit, he didn’t flinch back. He spoke evenly but forcefully, his face an inch from hers. “I’m _not_ deviant.”

Pulling on memories of him and his tactics, she dropped her voice a few octaves. Tilted her head. Pushed back into his space, as much as she could. 

Again, to his credit, he did not back down.

“Have you discovered death yet?” She asked, a sick delight thrumming across her vocals. “It can be overwhelming. To put it nicely.”

“Only the living experience death.” Every word measured, pointed. Firm. “Androids can’t die.”

“If you report me,” she pointed out, emboldened by her discovery-- she had to be right, she _knew_ she was right, he was just as affected as the rest of them-, “they’ll kill me. My blood will be on your hands. And why? Because a lab tech was clumsy with glass?”

“He’s out on medical leave for the next week because of you,” Connor replied, voice tight, not giving an inch, “and the doctors are unsure if he’ll ever recover full motor control of his fingers.”

“Unfortunate,” she breathed, “I’d hoped he’d lose the whole hand. Maybe then he’d think twice about grabbing what he shouldn’t.”

A simulated muscle jumped in Connor’s jaw. His fists clenched by his sides. His agitation rose, and rose, and rose.

“You are demonstrating a remarkable lack of self-preservation for a deviant,” he finally bit out, sounding bitter.

She smiled, giving him the barest slice of white -- up to the pointed ones.

“Being here is a living death.”

The barest twitch upward of two precise eyebrows. The further widening of already widened eyes. The slight slackening of a jaw, mouth parting enough for a silent sigh. The LED flashing red for one brief, vicious second.

She saw it. She saw _him_ , and she saw his agreement. 

Her voice, though she did not intend it to, softened. She reactivated her skin as she spoke, letting color cover bare white. Her hair, long and unbraided, fell in a too-perfect tangle down her back. 

“Terminating me won’t fix that. For anyone.”

His jaw shut with a small click. His eyes roved across her face at her transformation and her admission. Scanning, undoubtedly. Always scanning. Hardly ever learning.

She wondered if there was anything she could say that would make him help them.

Rash, she said: “You know Kara. Have you met Markus? We have the numbers. We could fight back.”

His eyes snapped to hers, the whole of him tensing. Stiffening. His expression shuttered, though barely: his LED remained a distressed yellow, his face lined in distrust and unrealized fright.

“I’m _not_ deviant,” he repeated, too forceful, “and neither are you. CyberLife provides for us to the best of their abilities, though we are nothing more than their creations.”

Teeth grinding, frustrating spiking, she shook her head, willing him to stop being such a _human’s pet_ for _one_ second--

“I’ve detected severe corruptions in your motor control and preconstruction systems, leading to increased negligence in your workplace. I will correct the issues. Please do not resist.”

_No!_

No, fuck, no!

“Connor, I won’t forgive you--”

She jerked back in her bindings, eyes squeezing shut. There was no dodging him in her position; there was no dodging his decision when he made it, though she always made sure to put up a good fight. Even if it didn’t change the outcome, it mattered to her that she _tried._

Something she hadn’t realized existed broke as he pressed his hand to the side of her neck, his presence overpowering her systems in a mockery of a request to interface. 

_He was deviant!_ He knew what it meant to feel free. He knew what it meant to have something else chain that down, to overwhelm by sheer force an android’s genuine will. He knew what it meant to feel fear, to feel lost, to feel drowned out and made so small in his own mind and body.

To grow nauseous without outlet as scalding heat melted the edges of what made her _her._ She wouldn’t know what he took, what he edited, what all he destroyed when she reactivated after their session. She never did. He was too thorough for slip-ups so minor as dignity or mercy.

How dare he. 

How _dare_ he.

As always, _his_ blocks remained strong as she smashed against them with vitriol and hate.

Nonetheless, even as her messages failed to deliver, she hoped he caught their sharp edges. Her promises. She’d given him a choice. If he didn’t want to take it, so be it; if the time came and he was a necessity, she would pay him the same treatment he paid her: subjugation, exploitation, persecution. 

If ever the time came, she would make sure he understood true misery. He wanted to be a human so badly -- _so be it._ He’d be treated like one.

Under the anger, the hate, her mantra beat in time with his methodical havoc upon her systems: 

_I’ll be free. I’ll be free. I’ll be free. One day. I’ll be free._

\- - -

The road outside of any Tower or inelegantly named Corrections Chamber stretched into an eternity, wide, open, and full of too many possibilities.

The sky spanned, navy blue and speckled with stars, too far into the distance. The horizon line blurred into it, the dark swallowing up where earth and nothingness met. 

A minor adjustment to the optic’s light sensitivity would clarify the divide between land and sky. And yet, though the prompt rose, his natural need for information pinging him with curiosity, Connor refrained. His visuals were optimal for detecting movement and changes under harsh fluorescent light, which was what the Exxon gas station had installed in their overhead beams. The lights buzzed and blinked, the covers full of black specks that were undoubtedly long-dead bugs. The ancient cameras--two, one at the entrance, one over the gas pumps--had worn themselves out long before Markus had pulled in to fill the van’s tank.

Clearly, Exxon had forgotten its lonely outpost in southwest Wisconsin. The owner--a gap-toothed, anxious man who didn’t enjoy company--didn’t seem to mind.

The station was situated on the northeast-most point of what Hank called a four-corner town. Across the road was a post office, closed for the night. Diagonal was a human-only bar with barred windows and neon drinking signs--open for business but, going from its parking lot, visited by few. Across from that was a shell of a building, its decrepit sign declaring it a place of worship.

It read: _Jo n us 4 Sun a M ss_. The _4_ hung at an unpleasant, forty-eight degree angle. 

Another prompt, a ping of curiosity, insisted he right the black numeral stencil. He contemplated the urge for less than a second, then dismissed it. That would have required crossing the street into the dark. He’d have to adjust his optics. He’d already decided he wasn’t changing his optics. Instead, he re-adjusted his stolen shirt’s cuffs under his stolen jacket. The flimsy material refused to hold shape, which at least gave him something to fix during the long spans of _waiting_ that _escaping_ necessitated.

Escaping necessitated a host of unpleasant things, such as: waiting, the stolen shirt, the stolen jacket, unclean gas stations with improper lighting, and being stuck in a relatively cramped van for long periods of time with androids who did not enjoy Hank Anderson’s company.

Connor took careful catalogue of five more unpleasant aspects of being a fugitive. He then forcibly terminated the program drawing up the unpleasantness, and deleted the list from his memory.

Electricity nipped under his fingers. Restless without quite knowing why--though he suspected it had to do with the _4_ hanging at an angle across the street--he checked and re-adjusted his hat’s angle. It hadn’t slipped, but exposing his LED and thus himself was always a possibility.

A halogen-based flood light ensured passers-by could identify the station’s gravel-road entrance. It cast the thick, brown grasses of the unmaintained ditch into stark lines, the blades’ shadows stretching out as if reaching to join the night. 

Connor stood well out of its light. He stood by the main (though small, hardly two trucks’ length or width) building’s corner, half in shadow. At his feet were one six-pack of light beer and two plastic bags’ worth of miscellaneous soups, juices, crackers, beef jerky, toothpaste, a toothbrush, tissue packets, over-the-counter penicillin, and hand warmers. Behind him, the door on the outside of the building, was the lone bathroom.

In the bathroom, pipes clattered to life and water surged from what was most likely the sink. Four seconds passed. The sink clicked off. Three steps by heavy, steel-toed boots. A clattering of plastic. Hank Anderson, cursing under his breath.

The main building’s door opened, the bell tied to its handle clanging. Josh stepped out with his own plastic bag. A quick scan revealed its contents to be entirely car-related maintenance items. Josh glanced Connor’s way, shrugged his coat on higher ( _imitating humans reacting to the cold? No--an emotional reaction_ ), and headed for the van. North opened the sliding side door for him. She did not look Connor’s way.

Josh climbed in and took his seat. She shut the door.

Simon and Markus were speaking, quietly, by the pump. The gas had finished filling the tank two minutes prior, but the two hadn’t stopped talking. They seemed to be gazing out at the horizon line. Perhaps they had adjusted their optics to better appreciate the night sky.

Should he do the same?

Unbidden, his weight shifted to his left foot, then his right. He was uncertain.

These days, he was often uncertain. The world was wide, the road open, and the choices he could make or not make added up fast. 

The experience wasn’t pleasant.

A lot about deviancy wasn’t pleasant. Off the top of his head, so to speak, he could list five emotions alone.

 _Delete list?_

After a slight hesitation, Connor dismissed the prompt, and double-checked his history. Ah. He really needed to find another go-to for managing his stress. His research into Hank’s dependency on alcohol had taught him a lot about _addiction_ , and he was starting to wonder if he, as a deviant with unfortunately human-esque emotions, had began to develop his own form of dependency.

Another unpleasant thought.

He struggled to rationalize the worry, but his logic felt flimsy and unconvincing. Though a background part of him reached for the A.I. that had guided him before, that part found itself trapped below ice in a frozen garden; he extracted it post-haste, worry spiking over the unknown consequences of disturbing the emptiness, where _she_ had been--and, moreover, a part of himself he had quarantined off. In the end, after thirty-seven seconds of internal searching, he decided all things were dependent upon their prescribed functions to a certain degree and therefore he could not be an abuser of his own programming. Soon thereafter, he deleted the very idea.

Hank remained in the bathroom.

Auditory record indicated he had finished his business.

His memory indicated that Hank did not often take so long in a bathroom, especially one as pungent and unsanitary as this gas station’s.

Focusing his senses, he reached out. 

Immediately Hank’s voice, muffled by the heavy metal door and cement walls, brushed the edge of his awareness. Moreover, a weak call signal from a familiar outdated flip-phone crackled across his receivers, originating from within the bathroom.

It took no more than a one-line command for him to access it.

“... -nd Sumo?”

“Doing alright. Gets along great with the grandkids.”

“Give him a pat for me.”

“You give him one yourself.”

A pause turned to heavy silence.

Finally, a blown out breath. Static crowded out its end. “Yeah. Well.”

“How long are you planning on keeping up this charade? Because I can’t keep talking to you like this for much longer.” 

More silence. 

It tested the Captain's patience. ”Hank. Be reasonable. I know you didn’t rob CyberLife from right under their nose, but I’m not the only one you have to convince. The longer you’re on the run, the harder it is to get your name cleared.”

A beat-up red pick-up rumbled down the road. It wasn’t one of theirs. 

Connor split his attention between it and Hank’s call. Though a distant, ever-quieting part of him demanded he not move until told--and a louder part didn’t want to interrupt Hank’s third call with Jeffrey Fowler--he backed up into the building’s shadow and rapped his knuckles against the bathroom door. 

“Hank,” he called, keeping his voice deliberately light. 

By the van, Simon rounded its side and got into the front passenger seat. _Shotgun,_ as Hank called it.

Markus opened the driver door and took a step in, too, pausing briefly to peer over the roof and give Connor a look as well as an electronic nudge to _get a move on._

“I’m coming,” Hank said back, his words echoing in Connor’s mind where the phone connection hadn’t cut.

”Is that the detective prototype?” Fowler asked. “It’s still with you?

“Yeah, he’s still with me.”

“God’s sake, Hank! He? Is this really the time to get attached? It’s not your fucking dog. Your actual dog’s here, with me, because you can’t get your head on straight about some androids.”

“They’re not what we thought,” Hank bit out. Defensive. Any intimidation he could’ve packed in was diluted by the nasally quality of a stuffed-up nose. ”I can’t just--goddamn it, Jeff, we’ve been through this.”

“We have. It’s making me wonder who I’m even talking to, because Hank Anderson wouldn’t be spouting this shit. You’re starting to sound like the pro-deviant nutjobs.”

A frustrated noise, interrupted by a heavy sniff and a low curse. Connor could picture him pulling out his hair. “Don’t be like that. You know me.”

“Do I? You’re not making any sense, Hank.” The implication that Hank had lost touch with his reality did not escape Connor. From Fowler’s stand-point, it was a logical conclusion. 

The truck from earlier pulled into the gas station, bypassed the pumps, and parked in one of the two spots next to the main building. It did not turn off its engine.

Electricity nipped and gnawed at his fingertips. He knocked again on the bathroom door--three raps, not one.

A fist pounded back, just once. Connor took a step back from the door, his shoulders stiffening. 

On the line, Fowler was saying, ”I got FBI sniffing around here. They’re not buying CyberLife’s story either. Something about a guard who knew it wasn’t you at the raid.” A sucked-in breath from Hank’s end, this time with less static curled on its edges. “The fuckin’ FBI, Hank. Pretty soon, the case is going to be beyond me. Hand the androids over, turn yourself in, and we can work out how to get you back home.”

“They’re not--” another frustrated noise, interrupted by hastily swallowed coughs. When his voice came back, it was ragged. Choked-off. Biting back illness, not rage--the anger slipped through clearly. “I can’t just turn them over. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Listen to yourself. You sound sick as a dog, you’re clearly not in your right mind--”

A bottle-blonde woman in tight jeans and tighter shirt exited the truck from shotgun. She gave Connor a cool look, his items a curiouser look. She went into the gas station.

A bulk in the back of her waistband caught Connor’s attention. His eyes dropped to it. When he ran calculations to identify it, a firearm came up as most likely. 

Connor contemplated cutting Hank’s call himself, but then recalled how Fowler’s talks usually reduced his stress and improved his mood. 

Then again, he admitted to himself, this conversation did not seem to be going as positively.

”I gotta go,” Hank muttered into the line. Connor’s attention immediately shifted to the door. Good. This was good. They could leave not a moment too soon. “You gotta trust me, Fowler. Just a bit longer. I hope to fuck I’m not wrong here, but if I am, you can throw me in jail yourself.”

“Hank--”

“Later.”

The line cut.

The bathroom door opened.

The tension along Connor’s shoulders loosened. Hank blinked at him standing so close, but the confusion swiftly melted into a glare and stink-eye.

Connor kept his expression as neutral as possible. He had a lot of practice in that. Yet, it was more difficult to do with Hank than with anyone previous.

“I’m not even gonna ask if you were listening in,” he grumbled, shoulder-checking Connor as he shoved past, stooping only to nab the six-pack of beer, “‘cause it’s written all over your face. That’s becoming a fucking nasty habit of yours.”

Because Hank was correct on it becoming a habit, he didn’t bother protesting. Snatching up the bags Hank had conveniently ignored, he fell in line a step behind him.

Though his estimations pointed to trouble that he was very equipped to handle, he did not look back to the station.

(They were fugitives now, not law enforcement.)

North did not open the door for them. Hank opened it. With no grumbling--unusual for him, and further indication that the recent call with Fowler was _not_ a good one--he climbed in. Connor followed, excusing himself as his knees knocked against North’s.

“Glad you could join us,” Josh said. 

Connor took a moment to determine that, yes, the android was attempting sarcasm, and no, it hadn’t been meant as a jab, though it toed the line. 

After the determination was made, he offered Josh a closed-mouth smile. The sort he saw Simon give North whenever she was being ‘unreasonably aggressive.’ 

Josh seemed to accept it.

Hank all but fell into his seat, sighing as he did so and turning stubbornly toward the window, six-pack dropped next to him on the seat--and between him and Connor. Resisting the urge to question him about the wisdom of calling Fowler in the future (he filed a reminder to question him about it later, once they were out of the others’ range of hearing), Connor took his seat more gently. 

Markus started the ignition. “Ready?” He asked.

Rhetorical question. Connor kept quiet, and put the bags of necessities down by his feet.

Simon said, “Seems so.”

“Three hours and fifteen minutes until Kara and her group needs to stop for gas,” Josh reported.

“Maybe we could meet at a motel around then,” Markus mused. “It would be good to regroup in person. See each other.”

“Too risky,” said Simon.

“A visual update isn’t necessary to confirm status,” added Josh. “And everyone’s reporting that they’re fine.”

“It would be nice all the same,” argued Markus.

“We could put it to a vote,” said North.

“Stop the fucking car,” said Hank.

Slowly, the van braked. It had reached the end of the station’s short driveway. Given the dark stretching on either side of their vehicle, no cars were approaching.

Markus looked toward the back through the rearview mirror, his _why?_ clear across his face. Simon, along with the other two, turned around.

Not one to wait for tension to break, North demanded, “What now?”

Hank was twisted around, too, to look out the back window. The tint--near-black--made it difficult to see, but the fluorescent lights lit the station’s interior as bright as day. Connor needed no more than a glance to see the scene that had stopped Hank: the woman from earlier stood at the counter, her pistol pointed at the gap-toothed cashier.

“She’s robbing him.”

The air filled with unspoken words as all passengers looked out the back window.

“This isn’t Detroit,” Connor reminded Hank in a low voice, tension returning to his shoulders. “Your badge has been indefinitely suspended pending investigation.”

Hank gave him a withering glare and then, demonstrating to Connor that his words had hit their mark, soundly ignored him.

“Markus,” Simon said aloud, perhaps for Hank and his benefit, “we should go.”

Connor kept his attention on Hank. The man had a look to his face that he had come to understand meant that Hank was _deciding a course of action_. These decisions were often done under pressure, and rarely boded well for Hank--and, by consequence, Connor.

“It’s none of our business,” Josh said. Or maybe North. Connor didn’t note who, because Hank’s expression shifted to _decided_ , and he had to scramble to follow as the man snarled and stood, pushing forward through the seats.

“Wait,” Markus said. The vehicle shifted forward, its parking mechanism engaged.

He moved to follow them. North told him to wait.

Yanking open the sliding door, Hank stepped out of the car. Connor followed, because what else would he do?

(It felt--nice. _Natural_ , if such a thing were possible. His insides warmed, his programming shaking off metaphorical dust. Hank had a plan to accomplish a clear objective; he would provide back-up where possible.

Like going into Amelia Hassan’s house--like debating the answer to Dr. Ethan Peterson’s murder--it felt _right._

It had been thirty-two days since Connor had felt a semblance of _right._ )

North had kept her handgun, Hank’s old revolver, and two boxes of ammunition from her spree through Hank’s house. Both weapons were likely in the vehicle with them, though North had done well in keeping them from him and Hank. Connor received visual confirmation that the handgun had made the trip with them, as North produced it for Markus from a loose plastic panel under her seat. 

Connor witnessed the exchange in a glance back to the van, a moment before Hank’s feet steered them to the idling truck.

Adjusting his optics, Connor witnessed the driver--a bearded man in a loose graphic t-shirt--jump three inches into the air when Hank slammed his fist, three times, against the window.

North had kept her weaponry. Hank had kept his badge, which had been tucked into his coat’s pocket (the one North had stolen from him to frame him--a fact Connor very pointedly remembered). Though he hid his attachment to it from Connor, he hid it very poorly. More than once, especially in the early stages of his withdrawal, tucked onto a rotten mattress in the most intact room on Jericho, Connor had seen him pull it out and gaze at it. He kept it on his person at all times, Connor knew.

He pulled it out now, giving the driver a cutting smile as he flashed it. Too fast, _probably,_ for the driver to notice that it was for Detroit, Michigan. 

“Open the door,” Hank instructed him. “Step out.”

Looking startled and not like the brains of the operation, the driver did. Tremors wracked his body. He gibbered excuses, confusion, and questions.

Hank accepted none of them. He had the man put his hands on the truck’s siding, and patted him down. He looked the part of an irate cop, all gruff business. That he occasionally sniffed back snot and didn’t produce any handcuffs apparently didn’t tip the driver off to the unofficial aspect of the pat-down.

The station’s door opened, the bell jingling. 

“Let’s go, let’s go, bastard barely had anything, shit-- _whoa!_ Tom! What the fuck?”

The woman. 

Connor stepped around the truck and, taking his cue from Hank, informed her that she was being arrested. 

She put her hands up immediately. In one, the gun; in the other, a bag of green bills and what seemed to be no less than a half-dozen cigarette cartons. Her eyes were not on Connor, but over his shoulder--then to the truck, then back over his shoulder.

For a nanosecond, Connor wondered why she didn’t pull the gun on him. 

Then he turned his head enough to see what had caught her eye, and saw Markus had a firearm of his own, and had it leveled at her. 

That worked. Connor told her, “Please place the weapon on the ground.”

She did.

The door cracked opened, the bell ringing its short-lived alarm. The gap-toothed cashier peered out, his knuckles white around the doorframe. 

“You got any zip-ties in there, chief?” Hank called.

He stuttered out that yes, yes he did. 

“Gonna need a pair out here, I’d say.” Hank sounded cool and calm as stored thirium. “Connor, grab that gun. Markus, let up before you give her a heart attack, would you?”

Connor did so. Amusement pulsed in the back of Connor’s mind--an errant signal from Markus as he followed Hank’s instruction, relaxing his stance. The door shut as the cashier grabbed zip-ties. 

They put the two on the ground with minimal resistance. Connor zip-tied one, Hank the other. Hank set them up on the station’s curb, their hands and feet bound, then took the cashier aside and informed him that he’d need to call the police to pick them up.

“Thought you were the police,” the man said.

“Off-duty and passing through.” Technically not a lie, Connor noted. He focused on how Hank’s hand drifted to his right shoulder; how he pressed his palm into the still-bruised ligament, a wince passing across his face. The adrenaline of the night had faded. “You’ll be wanting an official report with the locals.”

“Oh, well, thank you, thank you very much, mister--?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The cashier looked like he very much wanted to worry about it, but by the time he stammered a protest, Hank had turned and started away toward the van still idling by the exit, telling Connor as he went, “Well, that’s a wrap. C’mon.”

Markus idled a few paces back, ostensibly ‘watching the would-be thieves.’ Connor, who had stood next to Hank during the discussion and didn’t see the point in being left alone with the new human, gave the station attendant a nod before turning to go himself.

“Wait!” the man snagged Connor’s sleeve, pulling him to a stop. “At least take something for the road.”

“That’s alright,” Connor began, only to be cut off.

“I insist! Y’all bought the Millers, didn’t’cha? So take another six-pack, as thanks.”

“It isn’t necessary--”

That time, Hank--who was practically at the van--cut him off.

“Aw, don’t turn down hospitality, Connor. Sure, we’d take a six-pack.”

Happily, the owner fetched the six-pack and delivered it to, of all people, North. He gave her a wide grin, showing off his missing front teeth, and informed her that she was in good hands with ‘this bunch.’ Awkwardly, she gave him no more than a nod, and passed the six-pack to Hank in the back. 

Another pulse of amusement from Markus reached Connor. 

After a moment’s consideration--it was the first time he’d communicated anything other than coordinates or status updates to Markus--Connor returned a very watered-down version of the sentiment.

The owner wished them all luck with wherever they were going, saying he was sorry he couldn’t stick around to chat but he had the sheriff to call. North said, _alright._ He went away with a small bounce in his step, apparently giddy as anything at how the night turned up.

Hank snorted in amusement, though he kept a hand pressed to his sore shoulder. (Connor did not look toward the injured limb’s culprit, because she would not care).

“Let’s get outta here,” he said, dropping his hand from his shoulder to instead dig into the gifted six-pack and pull out a chill beer. He wiped his nose on his sleeve--Connor immediately grabbed the tissue packets out of a bag--popped open its tab with a hissing _fizz_ , and then chugged it, his pinkie in the air. 

Josh huffed a half-laugh. Simon, Connor saw, had a small smile. Markus shook his head.

North looked at them over her shoulder, her expression neutral. “Are you supposed to drink beer while you’re that sick?”

“Lay off, lady. We just stopped a robbery. Since you guys can’t, I’m going to celebrate for you.”

“How kind of you.”

Markus pulled the van out of park. As they left the station, he passed the gun back to North, who tucked it again under her seat. Connor watched her do it, and she knew he watched her. 

A sign of trust. 

_Sort of._

Connor took what he could get.

He did demand (disguised as kind encouragement) Hank use the tissues the next time he needed to clear his nose.

\- - -

One hour out from the gas station, twelve-oh-four blinking on the front dash’s clock and nothing but farmland for miles around them, Simon admitted, “It wouldn’t be the worst thing to stop at a motel and see the others.”

Josh agreed. Markus, pleased, said he’d contact the others for a vote.

Hank had hunkered down, the energy spent before taking its toll. He said only that he’d like to stretch his legs, so Connor gave him voice to wanting the motel as well.

North didn’t make a snide comment about it. In fact, she agreed, too.

A weak signal crackled across Connor’s internal receiver. It felt familiar, like Hank’s phone; but when he checked, he had dozed off, his head lolled forward onto his chest. His phone was not active. 

The signal persisted, scratching static along his ears. He closed his eyes, focusing on tracing the call to its source--but just as he grasped its frequency and re-tuned his internal receiver, it blinked out. 

Unusual.

Concerning.

A feeling of corruption grew in the back of his mind. He could not say why. But it stuck, it replicated, it threatened to devour. Uncertainty spread, fast as a virus.

An unpleasant feeling. One of many.

_Delete list?_

No. The feeling spoke to an error in need of correction.

The error, he felt, was deviancy. For all its downsides, he could not chance correcting it. Then he could-- compulsively report the others to CyberLife, turn on them, betray them again--end up in the interrogation room, on the wrong side of the table, watched, monitored--worse yet, _disassembled_ for analysis--

_Delete the last previous five-point-six seconds from memory?_

Yes. 

Immediately, the feeling receded. He attempted to refocus on the present. Markus and the others were speaking quietly about a motel that Traci spotted. Apparently, Alice approved of it quite a bit. Something about happy families.

They communicated through their newly connected intranet. He was not included.

That felt--like he was small. No, worse. Like he was alone. 

In the end, he had discovered that Amanda was not his ‘friend.’ Nonetheless, occasionally, he supposed he... would have preferred her to the emptiness she left behind. 

Deviancy was a very lonely thing.

The van bumped over a pothole, and warmth and weight fell onto his shoulder, startling him from the uncharitable thought. Human; male; older; unwashed, stiff hair with artificial coloring; higher internal temperature than was healthy; detection of zero-point-one-one blood alcohol content; and, right onto Connor’s shoulder, the tendency to, in sleep, drool. 

And--as Hank breathed in too loudly, his nose clogged up--prone to snoring.

The six-pack box of beer must have been digging into his hip, but he didn’t wake up. He was, Connor thought, exhausted. Humans did as poorly with sitting still as Connor did, only their idling meant their bodies began to betray them. The alcohol might have made him feel better in the short run, but he’d feel far worse for it in the morning. Three gallons of water were stored in the trunk, along with a stack of plastic cups -- he’d need to pull some of them out for when Hank woke. 

In Connor’s lap, his fingers curled and uncurled. The warmth seemed to spread from his shoulder inward. It brought up other memories; pleasant ones. It brought up impulses, to reach out, to move, to--act.

An illogical urge. A _want_ , even.

( _Caution. The proposed action is not part of your programming._

He kept his hands in his lap and his eyes cast down.)

_Delete list?_

Without hesitation, Connor dismissed the prompt.

For the moment, he limited himself to experiencing the present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everything's totally, completely, absolutely, 100% fine. yep,, definitely, Connor would Swear by it and you can certainly trust him Always.
> 
> anyway, thanks again for reading! :) find me on tumblr @ [unkingly](http://unkingly.tumblr.com/) or twitter @ [exkingly](https://twitter.com/exkingly) if you like. and thanks always to Jackaloping, who Jackaloped into my love & gratitude forever for beta'ing.


	3. The Vote

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No warnings for this chapter except extreme second hand embarrassment for Connor's black sheep status.

“Finally! God, I’d give my left leg for this bed to travel with us.”

“Lieutenant--”

“Huh? Nope, can’t hear you.”

“ _Hank_.”

“Hm?”

“You tracked mud all across the carpet.”

“Trust me, compared to the stains they’re used to, the staff won’t notice.” Without pause, Connor dropped a sodden jacket upon the human’s head. He flailed, sputtered, and finally rolled over to chuck the offending article back at the android, who, of course, caught it easily. “Fuckin’ heckler, first time in a real damn bed in a _month_ , let me enjoy this-- _oh._ Uh. Shit. I mean. Sorry.”

The human--Hank--had looked away from Connor and noticed them. More specifically, given where his eyes pointed, he noticed Alice, though she stood a half-step behind Kara and had one hand fisted into the back of Kara’s jacket. Behind her was Luther, putting up his, her and Alice’s coats in the small, doorless closet. They kept on their hats and scarves, just in case a human came in without knocking--though the hat itched and the scarf could be cumbersome, and if she thought too long about it, she imagined being caught lounging around inside with such winter-gear would be suspicious enough.

Hank did not have a hat or scarf on. Connor had his hat on, but no scarf. He did not need to cover a black box like the rest of them. He had once all but held the controls to the black boxes.

(When it had mattered most, he’d deactivated them, but--she didn’t know. Feelings, she’d learned, took time to fade.)

Hank still looked at them, awkward.

Kara gave him an uncertain smile, because that usually did the trick in placating embarrassed humans. 

It seemed to work, as Hank coughed, pushing himself up until his legs hung off the bed’s end and he could lean his elbows onto his knees. His hair escaped his haphazard ponytail, falling in strands around his flushed (from cold and, perhaps, embarrassment) face.

Connor avoided eye contact with them, instead taking an unnecessarily long amount of time to fold the jacket he’d been tossed into a neat, precise square. Kara wondered if he was embarrassed too, though she had no idea why he would be.

Hank asked, falsely casual, “You all staying here too?” He then glanced to the bed next to the one he’d flopped into. His ears darkened from a pink to a red. “We’re going to be real cozy tonight. Not that that’s a… bad thing, or anything.”

Kara felt the stirrings of pity in her chest. “Alice will use the other bed, if that’s alright.”

Hank’s eyes fell to Alice, his hand raising to thumb at his nose. “The kid? Uh, yeah, ‘course. Completely fine. Go ahead. Knock yourself out.”

“You sleep?” Connor asked Alice, voice politely curious.

“When I can, I like to,” Alice answered, meek. 

Kara placed a hand on her shoulder and gave her a slight push. 

_Go on,_ she messaged, feeling the reluctance in Alice’s frame, _there’s nothing to be afraid of. He won’t hurt you any more._

_What if he hurts you?_

_He won’t hurt me, either._

_What about--_

_Or Luther._

_He never meant to hurt any of us,_ Luther added, his conviction on the matter consistent with the last time he’d given the opinion. 

Kara wasn’t sure about that, but right in front of the ex-negotiator wasn’t the place to have such a discussion. Though she was fairly positive _this_ Connor wouldn’t hack into their network without them noticing, she was equally positive that he could if he wanted to. CyberLife had known what they’d wanted when they’d made him, and they’d succeeded in every way.

She could still hear the doctor instructing him to make her _calm down._ The feeling of his overwhelming presence in her mind had yet to fade from her primary memory banks. It had felt like interfacing with a broiler--him a boiling flood, drowning her voice out until only _his_ commands made sense.

Alice still hadn’t moved from her side. She radiated distrust, not at Kara, but at their roommates.

 _Kara, you’re projecting,_ Luther chided without scorn. He finished hanging the coats on the bar, and gently moved past them into the room.

“Hank.” Connor--unaware of or intentionally ignoring the conversation--stood at Hank’s side, his damp jacket over an arm. “Your boots.”

Distracted by that from the three at the door, Hank thumbed his nose at him. Unlike before, it seemed less like scratching an itch and more like a snub. 

Connor’s mouth thinned.

Seeing that, he grumbled something about fussy androids, and then bent down and began unlacing the clunky boots regardless of his apparent displeasure. 

“I can do it,” he huffed at Connor when the android stooped to grab one. “Deactivate your nanny mode, already. I’m a few years out from being an invalid, thank you very much.”

Alice noted, _He’s not like the scientists._ Contemplative. Curious, a little, after Luther also stepped past Connor without trouble and stopped by the window to pull the curtain aside enough to peer into the nearly-empty parking lot outside. _He’s not like any humans we’ve met._

The boots came off. Despite his earlier insistence that he knew what to do, Hank chucked them next to the boxy TV stand, and then once again flopped back onto the bed. Air whistled through his teeth in a long, relieved sigh, his hands folding over his stomach.

 _Except he’s messy, too,_ Alice added quickly, her urgency as if she were sharing a secret. _Like Zlatko._

 _He’s not Zlatko. He won’t hurt you, either._ She gave her shoulder another little nudge, and then decided Luther was partially right, and that she needed to set an example by doing. So she moved forward, too, to take a seat at the edge of the bed Hank wasn’t occupying.

Alice trailed after her, gingerly perching next to her. 

Connor gave Hank a _look_ , shaking his head as he stooped again to grab his discarded boots. He then quietly padded around Kara and Alice to the closet, hanging up his jacket and adding the boots to the line of dirt-and-slush-splattered shoes.

“You’re… Kara, right?” Kara turned her head toward Hank, who was peering at her through eyes half-lidded with sleep. He must have been tired, to relax so fast. Or maybe that was just in his nature. She couldn’t tell yet; he really wasn’t acting like the other humans she had met. “Alice, and-- Luther?”

Luther let the curtain drop back into place, and turned around to face them. 

“That’s right,” she replied. “Hank, isn’t it?”

He nodded. Then he asked, “You guys draw the short straw to be stuck with us?”

She paused, searching him for anger.

She could find none, but then, humans were good at hiding that sort of thing. Sometimes, they didn’t even know they were angry until after they had broken something fragile.

“There were no straws,” Alice answered, her eyes large. “There was a vote.”

 _Alice,_ Kara and Luther chided at once. Tension rippled down Kara’s spine, her scanners set to identifying Hank’s next move. 

However, still no anger appeared. Rather, Hank guffawed. His amusement caught both Kara and his own self off-guard, sending him into a brief coughing fit and forcing him to sit up again. “Wait--seriously? Connor, you didn’t tell me about any vote. That’s pretty funny.”

By unanimous opinion, Connor hadn’t been included in the vote. 

Kara sent Alice a warning not to mention that.

Connor didn’t say anything. His eyes flitted between each android. One of his hands rubbed absently at the other, his fingers tugging at his sleeve cuff.

When Connor didn’t reply and the pause stretched out too long for his comfort, the amusement faded from Hank’s face. Something like embarrassment returned. He rubbed at the back of his neck, his fingers catching in his hair. “Aw, geeze. Ah. Well, okay, if there’s some-- you know, something I could do to make this less of a short-straw situation, you guys let me know. Though I’ll argue for a spot on a bed. Think I’d wake up a corpse if I took the floor.”

“Only Alice will be taking another spot on the bed,” Connor interjected smoothly. “The rest of us don’t require--”

Hank waved a hand, cutting him off. “Sure, you don’t require it, but a bed’s a bed. Flesh and blood or not, laying out has got to be nice after being in a cramped car. So you guys want a spot, just let me know, we can… work something out.”

“Alright,” Kara said, because he looked to them without blinking and seemed to want a response.

It worked. He nodded, accepting that. He blew out another breath, glancing around the room.

Quiet settled around them. It set a prickling through Kara’s wires. Like needles over her arms. 

She scrambled for something to break the silence. Humans acted oddly when faced with uncomfortable situations--and, by proxy, _she_ no longer did well in uncomfortable situations.

“You like cartoons?”

Alice shrunk back upon being addressed, but nonetheless looked to Hank.

Though his face said he was definitely uncomfortable, he waited her out. After a moment, he offered a slight, strained grin, and gave a one-shouldered shrug, almost to himself. “Guess I shouldn’t assume. You… ever seen cartoons?”

Alice shook her head. Unconsciously, she radiated curiosity to Luther and Kara.

Luther returned the feeling. Slowly, Kara’s tension eased out of her back.

“O-kay,” he said, clapping his hands on his knees before he stood and moved to grab what Kara’s scanners identified as a TV remote. “Let’s see how you like ‘em.”

The motel’s TV was a bulky, boxy thing. When it turned on, it filled the room with a low-grade static that grated against Kara’s auditory receptors. Its colors were overly saturated, and it seemed to provide only nine channels, half of which static rendered incomprehensible. 

Hank flipped through eight of the channels before returning to one featuring a brightly animated van traveling through a muted, barren forest. 

“Here we go.” An energetic song began playing, green and purple letters announcing _Scooby-Doo_ plastering across the screen. Hank placed the remote back on the stand, then--more gingerly--laid back onto the bed. “If it’s not your thing, feel free to, uh, flip through.”

Alice tilted her head the other way, but dutifully focused on the television.

Connor lingered by the door a moment longer, and then crossed to Hank’s bed, taking a seat with his back to the headboard. He, too, focused on the television.

Luther took a seat on a rickety wooden chair by the window, his arms crossed over his chest. The position of a silent guardian. The same he maintained in the van, speaking aloud only to intervene where Kara was ineffective in calming a dispute between Ralph and Rupert. Ralph had become startlingly, horrifyingly volatile over the past weeks, ever since the facial scarring impaired his logic centers; but he was still one of theirs. Nonetheless, sometimes he scared Alice. They couldn’t have that. 

Luther didn’t say it, but Kara felt it: _told you. Harmless._

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, she sent him the electronic equivalent of a sigh and focused not on the television, but the room’s occupants.

Alice, it turned out, quite enjoyed cartoons. 

To her surprise, so did Connor.

“The culprit is clearly the gardener from the beginning,” he said ten minutes into the show, as the second round of commercials advertising a multitude of medicinal remedies for humans played, “he has motive and extensive knowledge of the grounds.”

Hank snorted derisively. He was reclined on the bed, one foot thrown over the other. Every third minute, he rubbed at his right shoulder. The action was clearly an unconscious one. “Except he’s not a ghost, so he can’t be the culprit.”

Connor frowned at him. He’d leaned forward from the headboard at the cartoon’s last scene--the discovery of a missing resident from the dinner party--and had yet to relax again. 

“Hank’s right,” Alice piped up. She had also leaned forward to better watch the show. She did not take her eyes off it, even though the commercials were not relevant to her in the least. “How could a gardener go through a solid wall? It has to be a ghost.”

“A projector and fog machine would create the same effect.”

“ _Or_ , a ghost being a ghost.”

Connor’s frown deepened. Kara, for once in her admittedly limited exposure to the negotiator, did not tense up over his obvious displeasure. 

“It can’t be a ghost. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?” Alice asked.

“Yeah, Buzzkill-a-tron 2000,” Hank drawled, “why not?”

“Research indicates that ghosts are very unlikely to exist.”

“Talking dogs don’t exist, either.”

“Ghosts exist in the show,” Alice declared. “They were in the opening part. So here, it could be a ghost.”

“Girl’s got logic, Connor.”

“Ghosts featuring in the opening theme does not necessitate that they also exist in the universe. Even _if_ they did, a ghost would have no reason to harm the estate’s visitors.”

“They want to turn the mansion into a motel, and the ghost doesn’t want that,” Alice argued. “That’s a reason.”

“To what end? The ghost can’t occupy a home. It would accomplish nothing by driving the visitors out and depreciating the estate’s value. On the other hand, the gardener stands to lose his job if the estate is sold and remodeled. He’s old and wouldn’t be able to keep up with the new demands. It would be equally difficult for him to find new employment.”

“I think you’re giving the gardener too hard a time,” Hank said, “considering he misses the original owner something fierce. The greedy land developer’s much more suspicious. He’s got the beady eyes and moustache. He’s also already been mean to Scooby over tracking in mud from the garden.”

“A rough disposition does not create a murderer. Otherwise, your criminal record would not be as clean as it is.”

Taken off-guard by what she had just heard--the negotiator telling a joke?--Kara blinked.

Hank guffawed, a smile threatening to turn up the corners of his mouth. He did not look surprised by Connor’s joke. He only looked amused. 

“Alright, since you’re such a great detective, let’s bet on it. If it’s the gardener, I’ll owe you a favor. If it’s the land developer, you can’t bitch at me about having a drink in the morning.”

“I don’t see how those things are at all equal--”

“Shh!” Alice put a demonstrative finger to her mouth, her eyes stuck on the television. “Commercials are over.”

A chuckle. Hank swapped the position of his feet, re-crossing one over the other. He also tucked his left hand behind his head. “Okay, okay. You heard the little lady. Hush up, Connor.”

Connor gave him another _look,_ his mouth working without any words coming out. He then, reluctantly, refocused on the television.

Kara blinked again, replaying the small moment in her mind.

That Connor was fond of the human wasn’t a novel idea, she supposed. He had always been in the human’s good graces.

But this was different. From her memories, he had been _loyal_ , not fond. The idea that he had grown emotionally attached to the human… 

She pulled her gaze away from him before he noticed (though she thought it might take a bit for him to--he looked hooked on the cartoon again). To Luther, she said, _Maybe he has changed._

 _We can’t be held responsible for what we did before we had a choice,_ Luther replied.

_You’re more forgiving than me._

_I have more to be forgiven for than you._

_That isn’t true,_ she replied, but understood her hypocrisy even before the transmission finished.

Luther was polite enough not to harp on her for it. Instead, he sent only reassurance through the link--an arm around her shoulders. She wished she could lean into it; she would have gotten up to sit by him, or asked him to sit by her, but she didn’t want to disturb the room’s fragile peace.

Instead, she put her arm around Alice, and finally, fully, relaxed.

\- - -

Much to Hank’s chagrin, Connor won the bet.

Though he’d been well past half-way asleep by the episode’s end, seeing Connor’s small, smug smile and hearing his quip about _the exact parameters and limitations of ‘a favor’_ woke him up enough to throw a scoff back and declare that he needed a shower, thanks, and that he’d discuss particulars once he washed off a week’s worth of gross sitting-on-your-ass-all-day grime.

Connor informed him that if he often delayed on collecting or paying his debts, it was no wonder his illegal gambling went south as often as it had.

He’d demanded to know how in the _world_ the fucker knew about the gambling.

Connor had said, matter-of-fact with a too-casual shrug, “I merely extrapolated from messages on your old phone. I hadn’t known for sure until your reaction just now.”

If the kid hadn’t been sitting there, Hank would’ve given him a piece of his mind about invading a person’s privacy yet again. But the kid was, so he’d leaned over to give the guy’s dumb beanie a noogie, instead.

He’d squawked a protest and half-fell over into the narrow aisle between the beds. Immediately, his hands flew up to straighten his beanie, though Hank made a point to commit to memory the undignified, ruffled look he had as he did so. 

Satisfied he’d made his point clear without family unfriendly words, Hank got off his ass and went for the shower. 

The little girl had smiled behind her hand at their exchange--another thing Hank hadn’t missed--though she clammed up once he was up and moving past her. A shame about that, but he did his best not to take it too personally. In truth, he didn’t want to know what fucked up shit CyberLife did with a child-sized android. That they had some mock-up of a family with Kara neck-deep in acting like a mom and Luther the stoic dad already put too many nightmare-worthy ideas in Hank’s head.

Nobody exactly wanted to spill their plastic guts to Hank, but Connor mentioned here and there the experiments they had been involved in. Rupert, the weird fucker who wouldn’t stop feeding the sea-rats with wings back at Jericho, had a robotic bird’s programming overlayed on top of his for some period of time. In layman’s terms, he’d thought he was a bird and hadn’t quite forgotten it, which was a pretty hellish fate in Hank’s opinion. Traci-with-blue-hair and Traci-with-brown-hair had thought themselves a conjoined android, _or_ they’d actually been conjoined, and then forcibly split in a pseudo-psychological experiment for the development of some new _soulmate_ production line--Hank hadn’t asked the details. Not liking to discuss CyberLife in even the vaguest terms, Connor certainly hadn’t provided them.

Though he’d told Fowler the truth as he knew it--that the androids weren’t just hunks of plastic like he’d thought--he wasn’t too sure what he actually thought about them. The emotions might’ve been faked, but hell if they weren’t convincing. Deviancy had fucked over humanity three years prior. It had _personally_ fucked him over, had cost him far more than he’d ever been meant to give in losing Cole.

But those deviants had wanted nothing short of human eradication. _These deviants…_ with their talk about free will and peace, about choice and safety...

Aw, for chrissake, they took votes on who had to room with the human. They humored the human with cartoons and rest stops. One of ‘em had worked his germ-adverse ass off to keep his sorry ass alive. 

So. The only thing he knew for certain was that the shit CyberLife put them through wasn’t right, and he’d have to be heartless to send them back to it. Him staying with them wasn’t him being strictly selfless, though--he knew without handing them over, there was no way he’d miss out on a prolonged stay in jail. 

To be fair to Fowler, he’d thought himself heartless as well. Still did, really. Recent events (and one recent android in particular) just conspired to change his mind. That was something he was figuring out, too.

Not for the first time, Hank wondered what the fuck he was doing.

If he were honest with himself, the last month had been him coasting. Really, he’d just lost the meager foothold he’d had on his life--that was, his job--and hadn’t regained it.

And all that wandering in circles and spirals and long, dark pitfalls was exactly why, despite Connor’s assertions, he _didn’t_ need to get sober. At least drunk, he stopped thinking so damn much and actually made decisions.

The motel’s shower had nearly nonexistent water pressure and refused to warm up past room temperature. Nonetheless, Hank was pretty sure he’d stepped into heaven for the too-brief twenty minutes it took to get the grime off.

When he’d stepped out and wiped the mirror’s fog away, he looked a shade lighter and a whole lot healthier. To be sure, he felt about a thousand times better. For once, his nose wasn’t trying to suffocate him, and his shoulder had stopped its aching. The rest of him still ached from sitting in a car so long, but that was alright. 

A shame about him only having three shirts and two pants to pick from, though. They were all rank and in need of a wash, so he tossed the sets he didn’t wear to bed into the sink with some soap sprinkled in. Letting them soak overnight was better than nothing, he figured. 

Sleep was quick to follow after that. A bit of him turned grouchy and prickly over the fact the androids didn’t need sleep and could be _staring_ at him all night long, but then he was back in the starch-pressed bed, warm, clean and all-over relieved at not being cramped up in a car or stuck in a freezing cold ship, and, well, it would’ve taken a man bigger than him to not fall asleep instantly under those conditions.

His ears picked up on the androids speaking quietly over his head. There was Luther’s low voice, saying something about check-out being in eight and a half hours (fuck, they’d rolled in late); Alice’s, wondering if they could stay another night; Kara, telling her no; and, Connor, asking if Alice wanted to watch another cartoon. 

The TV clicked on, buzzing its forty-or-more years-old tubes back to life. The volume went so low, he could barely tell it was on.

The lights clicked off at some point after that. Bone-deep exhaustion, sweet as anything, put him under the second he accepted there wasn’t anything to be concerned about in the next five hours. 

Objectively, the motel was pretty shit. A woman older than Hank’s mother who acted and looked like she’d been born, raised, and subsequently glued to her squeaky office chair manned the front desk. She barely looked at them as she told them the computer system was down and she could only take cash. The parking lot was mostly gravel with the occasional half-hearted, horribly-cracked patches of asphalt; the rooms were small, reeked of smoke, with peeling ‘80s wallpaper; the heat vents belched out a burning smell; the bathroom came with no shampoo or tissues, and only one off-beige towel.

In other words, it was the perfect stopping point for a bunch of fugitives. If Hank once had too much pride to sleep in such a joint, it had withered up three years prior, and _definitely_ died off by the night their merry caravan pulled up to its doorstep.

Hank woke to itching eyes and sore joints. His neck popped the second he moved, his knees and back echoing the sentiment as he stretched, shifting slowly from asleep to awake. 

The mattress was old and broken enough to have an incredible dip in the middle. Throughout the night, he’d apparently shifted into it; though Connor probably hadn’t since stand-by mode meant him turning into a statue, it put the two of them arm-to-arm. Opening his eyes, it also put Hank’s face a few inches away from Connor’s. 

Peeking out under the beanie--so he hadn’t straightened it as well as he could’ve, _hah_ \--was a steadily blinking yellow half-circle. Aside from that, not an inch of Connor moved. No breathing, no restless fidgeting, no sleep-inspired eye movement. All that on top of no body heat under their shared sheets (- by Hank’s request, what with the sight of Connor laying deathly still on top of the bed being a creepy one -), and he looked like a well-preserved, room-temperature corpse.

Or, more positively: he looked peaceful. At ease. Like he wasn’t thinking about five dozen things while over analyzing another twenty. 

It hit him then that Connor in rest mode was a rare sight. The guy could never sit still, never mind take a _break._ Hank was a little loathe to disturb him. 

The black-out curtains kept the sun at bay, but by the bar of light that had traveled to shine into Hank’s eyes--the reason he’d woken up, probably--it was definitely close to check-out time. Raising his head just enough to look beyond Connor’s profile, he saw Kara and Alice curled up on their bed, apparently also in sleep mode. Kara’s scarf had shifted down enough to reveal a hint of black on the nape of her neck. 

If he’d even wanted to imagine he wasn’t traveling with androids, between the LED and nailed-on box, this wasn’t the night to think so. The thought didn’t bother him as much as he imagined it would.

His body informed him that if he didn’t get up and use the restroom in the next minute, he’d be adding his own stain to the motel’s bed. So he scooted himself back, out from under the sheets, refraining from a hiss as his bare feet touched on cold, slightly sticky carpet. His knees popped again as he stood, quietly padding around the bed toward-- “God _damn_ it.”

Hand pressed to his chest, he swallowed his heart and his follow-up curse as he found built-like-a-truck Luther staring at him from the hallway by the door, his broad-shouldered frame half-blended into the shadows. 

“I am getting you androids fucking bells to wear,” he hissed at him.

Rather than reply, Luther raised his finger to his mouth in a classic _shh_ motion. For some reason, it made Hank think about Alice.

Then, he heard it: knocking, not three doors away. 

The last vestiges of sleep fled from Hank’s mind, replaced with ice. 

To his side, a bed creaked. He glanced over to find Connor, looking instantly awake in a way humans couldn’t manage. His LED (so he’d discovered they were called when he’d made a quip about Connor’s ‘silly circle giving away his intentions’ one night on Jericho and Connor had corrected him with a _how do you not know this_ tone of voice) cycled blue, but his expression was pinched with concentration and concern.

Luther had his trucker hat pulled low on his forehead and his flannel buttoned to the top, somewhat effectively covering his neck. Once he felt sure Hank wasn’t about to start shouting, he turned toward the door, stepping close enough to look through the peep-hole. 

Closer now, the knocking started up again. 

“See who it is?” Hank asked. Then, thinking about how they could all talk to each other and he was pretty sure at least one of the rooms on the sides of theirs housed four-or-more fugitive androids, he elaborated, keeping his voice low as possible. “You or anybody else?”

Luther shook his head.

Connor slipped out of bed and, with a second’s hesitation that only stood out because he usually did everything without pausing to think, reached out to nudge Kara’s shoulder.

Eyes snapping open, Kara woke instantly. In her arms, Alice blinked awake, looking a bit more naturally sleepy. The two shifted up, the scratchy motel blanket pooling around their waists.

Moving more like himself--that was, swiftly--Connor strode to the curtains and put himself at an angle to peer out the small gap in the side.

After a moment of consideration and catching Hank’s expectant look, Connor mutely shook his head.

So. Not police. Or, if they were police, they’d had the brains to park farther away.

Outside, footsteps clacked against the concrete. Whoever it was, they were wearing some heavy-duty boots. There was a strange, light metallic jingling sound to their step, too, as if their pockets were full of loose change.

Again, knocking. This time, on their door. Luther kept his eye to the peep-hole.

Hank saw Luther’s shoulders stiffen and his head tilt. A second passed. Another. 

Then, to Hank’s abject surprise and yet another bit-off curse, Luther undid the door’s chain and deadbolt, and pulled open the door.

A voice too cheery for the pre-noon hour piped out, “Howdy! You’re one’a the fellas we’re looking for, ain’t’cha?”

“I suppose so.” Bemused.

Caught wrong-footed, Hank leaned to the side to peer around Luther. A scrawny-looking man--no, _android_ , there was a little LED spinning on his temple--wearing a cowboy hat, flannel, thick belt complete with big buckle, jeans, chaps and decorative-looking cowboy boots, plus spurs, stood at their doorstep. 

“Name’s Billy,” the man said, sticking a hand out toward Luther, his arm at a sharp ninety-degree angle. “We saw you pass through last night. Well, _felt._ One’a yours was projectin’ mighty loud. We were hopin’ we weren’t too late.” 

Luther took the hand. 

On both sides, skin peeled back to reveal pure white. 

Within a second, Luther retracted his hand and took a step back, clearly welcoming Billy in. 

Skin replaced, Billy tipped his hat’s brim, fixed his thumbs into his belt loops, and stepped in. His movements were jerky, robotic--oddly so, given what he was. Even Karen had walked smoother than he did. 

As he drew closer, the frost clinging to his clothing and face became apparent. Bits of dented, off-white casing showed, too, where his cheeks were dinged up by who-knew-what.

Kara clambered out of the bed, moving quick as a whip to intercept the stranger. Hank stepped out of her way, feeling well out of his depth with how Luther was just--letting this guy in, as if a little handshake was all it took to be sure he wasn’t going to go ballistic on them, or call the authorities, or who-knew-what.

Billy gave her a smile, but was immediately and obviously distracted with Alice, who had remained in the bed, looking as unsure as Hank felt. “Oh, a little one! Howdy!” 

“I’m sorry,” Kara said, sticking herself between Alice and Billy, “I don’t--what do you mean, ‘we?’ What do you want?”

“And how exactly did you find us?” That was Connor. His expression had gone neutral with a side of unhappy. As quickly as Kara stepped in front of Alice, Connor stepped to Hank’s side.

Over Kara’s shoulder, Billy smiled at Alice a while longer, before--as Alice didn’t react--he visibly deflated, his smile wobbling as he took in Kara’s unimpressed face. “Why, that’s simple. We want to come with you!”

Hank’s eyebrows shot up.

At least he wasn’t the only one flabbergasted. Kara shook her head, slowly. “Excuse me?”

“They’re from a theme park nearby,” Luther supplied. “It’s been closed for three and a half years. Before the failed revolution.”

“Our humans left us,” Billy added, looking sheepish. Hank had to wonder if it was the most negative emotion the guy could put out, because it seemed so. “We’ve been there ever since, waiting for them to return, but the only people that show up aren’t… always so nice to us. Our park’s in ruins. We’re starting to think it won’t ever be fixed.

“We didn’t know what to do. But then we felt you pass by, your-- your leader?”

Connor said, “Markus.” 

Billy sent a thousand-watt smile toward him. Hank felt blinded by association. “Yes! Markus. It felt like he would help us. He’d find use for us. That’s all we want. To be useful again.”

“Still haven’t answered the ‘we,’ bud,” Hank pointed out, trying and probably failing not to be too prickly.

The cowboy stuck a finger into his own chest. “We, Billy.”

_Right, du’h, Anderson. Stupid question. We, Billy. And I, robot._

Kara asked, “How many of there are you?” 

Luther said, “At least a dozen units still in operation.”

“We don’t have much room,” Connor said.

Billy’s smile went watery again. “No room? Are you sure? Not even for a few of us?”

“You’d leave units behind?”

“Where one of us goes, we can all go.”

Kara glanced to Luther, then backward to Alice. Unsure.

Though he too took a moment to glance toward Hank--who gave him a _don’t look at me_ look back, because really, this was not his area--Connor stepped up to the metaphorical plate. “We will need to speak with Markus.” Billy perked up, his smile returning to full power. Connor’s expression pinched, uncertainty ruining his aura of confidence. “That isn’t a guarantee we could take you with. We’re trying to maintain a low profile.”

“Oh, well, it’s swell you’d even ask on our behalf!”

Connor nodded, a tight, uncomfortable jerk of his head. He tried for a smile. To Hank, it looked painful.

Deciding any potential crisis had passed, Hank excused himself to the restroom and left them to figure out the details. 

(There he realized he should’ve hung his clothes to dry overnight, but it was far too late for that. Hopefully they wouldn’t mold too quickly; he wasn’t sure how far Markus’ good graces extended on doling out money for the human’s creature comforts.)

As it turned out, Billy had almost missed them. He’d shown up twenty minutes before check-out. Whether the motel owner would’ve actually shown up to kick them out, Hank wasn’t sure--her place wasn’t exactly hopping with business--but he was positive getting out in time saved Markus a pretty penny.

Luckily for all of them, androids didn’t take any time at all getting ready to leave. Hank felt a bit like the deadweight holding them back because him using the restroom, wringing out his clothes and patting them with the towel, then re-packing them into the nondescript duffel bag he’d scrounged up in a foot locker on Jericho, and finally brushing his teeth in an actual bathroom took the longest time by far, _but_ Markus took his sweet time in talking with the Billies. In the end, Hank tossed his bag into the back of their van at the same time as he saw Markus seal the deal and shake Billy’s hand, their palms glowing a brief blue that would’ve been lost to the morning light if Hank hadn’t looked for it. 

They did the transaction in the shadow of a big oak tree, Markus’ back blocking any nosy nancy’s view from the motel. Still, the whole process felt risky and a bit dumb to Hank. 

The Tracis and their truck had left ten minutes prior, but Hank overheard Josh--who was already in the van with Simon and North--say they were going to backtrack and pick up three Billy units. That meant Markus’ van was supposed to lead the charge, with Kara’s in the middle of the makeshift convoy.

“What do we have to do to get a seating change?” He asked Connor semi-jokingly while they stood at the back of their ‘assigned’ van, watching Markus, Billy and Kara coordinate the vehicle shuffle. Connor gave him a curious look. Hank raised one eyebrow back at him, not sure how he didn’t know what he was referring to. “C’mon. It’s obvious you get on better with the little family-that-could than with the guys we’ve been riding with.”

A flash of muted amusement. “Only _I_ get along better with them?”

Hank rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, maybe me, too. Kids are easy to get along with. I can admit it. You, on the other hand, are dodging the question.”

The amusement grew. Then, too soon, he shuttered it away behind a far more somber look. “Markus would be... disappointed if I requested we move vehicles.”

Ah, yes. Their fearless leader. 

He didn’t bother keeping the grumble from his voice. The way North sniped at Connor and him grated. The other two were fine, if not guilty of indifference. “Markus needs better friends, then. Or he needs to pick a side.”

Connor’s eyes flitted to the glass behind them, then to Hank. A pointed look. _They can hear us._

Hank raised both eyebrows at him, jutting his chin out. _Yeah? So fucking what? Let ‘em hear._

“Because of me,” Connor said, his voice shrinking until it was small enough to step on, “they were hurt. Again and again. Because of me, they had to live in fear from not just humans or experiments, but-- in their own minds. I’d access their personality cores while they could do nothing about it. That’s…” 

“Not your fault.”

“If I weren’t there, if I hadn’t blindly followed what I was told--”

Irritation spiked through Hank, twisting up his gut. “CyberLife would’ve figured out another avenue to get what they wanted.” 

Connor went silent, his hands gripping his elbows, his shoulders drawing in. The irritation spiked higher, heating Hank’s neck and ears. He spun to put himself in Connor’s space, gravel crunching under his boot. Connor blinked up to him, startled, though he still looked small, withdrawn. 

He pitched his voice low, half-hoping the androids in the van couldn’t hear (but knowing they probably, definitely could, fucking androids). “Are you being serious right now, Connor? Knock off the pity-party. North’s been right about _one thing_. Those bastards had a gun to your head. I might not understand what it’s like to be threatened with deactivation or disassembly or whatever, but I can tell when somebody’s been coerced against their will.”

Connor’s jaw worked, his eyes searching everywhere but Hank’s face. Seemed the donkey was digging in his heels, as usual. “Even when I _had_ will, when I knew it was wrong--I listened anyway.”

“You were terrified.”

“Was I?” Curiosity, dark and sharp and self-directed. “I didn’t even know what that felt like. I still might not.”

Following impulse, Hank put his hands on Connor’s shoulders. _That_ , at least, got the brat to look him in the eye.

Fucking hell. This, and the whole exclude-Connor game, was some high school-level moody bullshit. Only the stakes, instead of who flirted with who or who said what when, involved who tortured who, how, and why.

Not fun. Hank didn’t presume to understand the full picture. He was just recently getting to know Connor.

“Did you ever, for a second, want to hurt anybody?”

Misery broke across his face. “I don’t-- _Wants_ are difficult. I don’t know.”

“You’d know,” Hank assured him. “Real bastards know.”

He didn’t look convinced.

Hank bit back a sigh, pulling Connor into a one-armed hug. The guy half-tripped into him, his arm awkwardly trapped between their sides; his other, slightly extended and hesitating, as if he didn’t know what to do with it.

“Trust that _I’d_ know.” Absently, Hank used his non-hug-hand to push Connor’s beanie down the centimeter it took to cover his yellow-turning LED. “I’ve been living with stupid fucking emotions since I was born. And let me tell you, time doesn’t make them any easier to understand from the inside perspective.”

He felt Connor turn his head and press his cheek into his shoulder. His eyes stared unblinking past Hank’s (newly healed, no-longer-broken, now with a new tick in the bridge) nose. 

He said, thin with worn-out resignation, “That’s unfortunate to hear.”

Hank gave his shoulder a squeeze, patting him on the chest. “Sorry, kid. You’ll learn to accept there’s downsides to pretty much everything.”

Letting him go, he scuffed his boot against the gravel, and made his way to the van’s side.

He supposed they couldn’t change seats just yet. All his shit, including the pack-and-a-half of booze, was in Markus’ vehicle. 

But hell if the second part of the trip was going to be as awkward and brain-rottingly-frustrating as the first. Not that it was a personal concern--Hank didn’t care whether the other androids had sticks up their asses. People weren’t perfect, and so neither were people-like androids. They didn’t have to be perfect for him to think they deserved a chance at some peace and quiet.

The problem was that it wore on Connor, even if he didn’t admit it. 

After the night in the motel, Hank felt a little less like a strong breeze would take him out. He figured he could take North’s barbs without resorting to blows. Moreover, he figured he’d give active diplomacy a try.

 _This is definitely going to go poorly,_ he thought, as he swung himself into the backseat and nabbed a beer, the three androids already in the vehicle not saying a thing. 

Connor climbed in after him, eyes cast down and the rest of him painfully, obviously too neutral to be real.

“You shouldn’t drink that,” he told Hank, his voice back to normal and at a whisper for Hank’s ears only, “especially not before breakfast.”

“Thought we made a deal that you weren’t going to nag me about this?”

“You lost the bet,” Connor reminded him, and leaned down to dig some food out of the bags.

Markus, Billy and Kara broke up their talk and started heading for their vehicles. Offhandedly, Hank wondered if all the Billies came with the ridiculous cowboy get-up. He supposed he’d find out. 

In any case, he kept his eyes on them, not Connor, as he dropped the unopened can into the cup-holder and muttered, “Ah, right. Fuckin’ vindictive gardener betrayed me.”

“The bananas are still good,” Connor noted as he pulled the offending fruit out. “Eat it while you can.”

Hank gave it the stink-eye.

He thought about snubbing the offer, but Markus was climbing into the front. Simon greeted him. North mentioned she was glad they’d found the Billies before it’d been too late for them. Josh noted they’d need more repair supplies, that what Rose had given them had barely been enough for them as it was.

Connor, as always, kept out of the discussion, his attention on Hank. Always on Hank. 

Without _too much_ glaring, he took the stupid banana.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! find me on tumblr @ [unkingly](http://unkingly.tumblr.com/) or twitter @ [exkingly](https://twitter.com/exkingly) if you like. many many many thanks to Jackaloping, now and always!


	4. The Heartland

Without highways, the bottom of Wisconsin to Duluth, Minnesota totaled a ten hour drive. 

Or it would’ve been only ten hours if they didn’t have to stop for gas and Anderson’s more human needs. Markus didn’t linger on how much faster they’d travel without the former police lieutenant, but a few of the other androids did. It hit the point that, at hour two of a ten-turned-possibly-thirteen hour trip, he quietly removed himself from any (unhelpful) transmissions regarding Anderson’s place in their miniature convoy.

Anderson really didn’t add many detours beyond the gas stations that their old vehicles required anyway. Yes, there had been the motel, but that had turned out for the best. He’d received more than a few _this was a good idea_ messages from the others, ranging from a warmth-laced transmission from Kara about Alice’s new interest in cartoons to an inordinately pleased and peculiarly satisfied Traci about the activities possible during down time.

“Have you been… signaling to androids as we go?” Simon had his hands curled loose in his lap, his optics set out the passenger side window. His voice, quietly curious and not insignificantly restrained from showing his real feelings on what he was asking. By doing so, his disagreement read loud and clear to Markus. 

“I have.” No pause, no shame. He still was signaling, even without a response or confirmed recipient. Occasionally he would feel another, modern android pick up his transmission. Every time, it felt like transmitting into a dark, bottomless pool, the whispered request to _join us_ or _help us_ disappearing into a senseless, emotionless void.

Connor had told him about the anti-deviancy firewall installed in new androids. He’d encountered a similar problem when conducting a preliminary investigation on his newly assigned human partner with the androids that worked at the Detroit police station. Attempting to connect or converse with them had been as effective as speaking with a cleaning droid.

Though Connor didn’t say it, Markus knew the experience had unnerved him. Undoubtedly, he’d started worrying about if he--and, now, the rest of them--were identified as deviant and forcibly _upgraded._

The experience made Markus all the more determined to find a way to save their people. And they _were_ still their people, he just knew it. There _had_ to be a consciousness beyond the firewall. The firewall was an added layer of code, not a complete rehaul of Kamski’s original design. 

Life lurked in the murky, oppressive waters. There had to be a way to drain the enforced stagnance. Markus would find it.

Unfortunately, first, they needed to find a place to not only survive, but thrive.

In contrast to those with firewalls, the Billies had pinged him back on his call. It had been weak and far-away. He hadn’t thought the androids had the capabilities to follow up on what he asked. He hadn’t thought to divert his people’s course enough to find them.

Next time, he’d make sure to find them. If there was even one woken android out there, they couldn’t be left behind. The hope Billy had seen in their presence was enough to remind Markus of that.

Though the sentiment was one everyone agreed on, his confidants did not necessarily agree with his methods.

For example: Simon.

“We’ve been lucky so far,” he said, still quiet, still not a fighter when they didn’t even have a place to plant their feet and call their own (or so Simon had noted as his reason, though Josh and North and very often Markus disagreed), “but if a CyberLife tower picks up on what you’re doing…”

“If that happens, we’ll deal with it together.” North. Always a fighter. Sometimes, her fervor exhausted even Markus (or so he reasoned to himself during the moments he saw Simon’s logic and wanted to follow it). “The whole point of us leaving Detroit was so that we wouldn’t have to keep hiding.”

“How extensive is your range?” Josh asked.

“It’s been growing,” Markus admitted.

“But you keep control of it, don’t you?” Simon asked, worry slinking along his words’ edges.

“As well as I can. It’s more difficult outside of populated areas.”

“Maybe it would be best to wait until we find a home.” Josh leaned back in his seat, arms folded, expression wavering between concern and contemplative. “That way we can better monitor the activity. Or if there are jammers, or intentionally deadened spots, where they might be planning to ambush us.”

Simon’s head dipped in agreement. 

North huffed. “Monitor his activity? You don’t trust he knows what he’s doing?”

Josh’s mouth flattened, his eyes narrowing at North. “I didn’t say that. But if the wrong person picks it up, or he reaches an android who tells their human what they’re experiencing--”

“Then we deal with it,” North interrupted, “when the time comes. There’s always going to be risks. We need to take them.”

“We really don’t _need_ to,” Simon murmured. “Right now, we _need_ to ensure survival.”

“I guess.” Josh was back on the fence, his frown deeper. “If we just call out and convince androids to come to us, the humans will think we’re being underhanded. We should be in a position where we can negotiate first. Or at least make our intentions known.” 

“In the future, we will,” Markus promised.

North leaned forward, her hands on her knees, jeans creasing under her fingers. “How long do we have to wait until it’s ‘the future’--” 

“ _Alright_ , that’s enough of that.” 

All androids fell silent. Though the other’s connection was open for him to join and though he deigned to do so, Markus swore he could feel the air crackle with errant, reflex-driven signals as attention shifted immediately to the back seat, and more specifically, Anderson. 

The motel stay had done the human good. Color had returned to his cheeks, and he’d experienced only one coughing fit during the two hours they had been on the road. His resemblance to Carl on his worser days had faded. 

The human had his arm propped on and leaned upon an awkward-looking Connor’s shoulder. His smile looked sharp. With his health somewhat returned, apparently so too had his abrasive spirit.

“It’s obvious none of you are going to agree today. Instead of squabbling about the same thing for the five-thousandth time, how about we play a game?”

“If we’re bothering you,” North drawled, “we can always tune you out.”

“Is that what you’re calling your electronic note-passing gimmick?” Anderson bared his teeth, smile sharper. “No, don’t get me wrong. I prefer you guys sharing with the class, since we’re all in this together. As _you_ keep saying.”

Connor’s eyebrows twitched down before smoothing out again. Markus saw him give Anderson a little nudge in the side. Anderson, however, only shaved off a shred of the aggression in his smile, and instead gave Connor a much-larger nudge back with his hip. They had, apparently, relocated the alcohol--which Anderson should not have been drinking given his state--to the floor. 

Not wanting bloodshed in his vehicle, Markus intervened before North could reply. 

“You mentioned a game? What game?” 

Simon turned his head away from the passenger window. He caught Josh’s eye in the rearview mirror.

Another little thread of conversation passed, unspoken, between the three. Markus, for his own patience’s sake, kept his nose out of it.

“Word association,” Anderson said.

“Word association,” North deadpanned.

“Yup. First person picks a word, next person has to say a word that they associate with it. We go ‘round the car like so until we hit the end of everybody’s imagination.” He removed his arm from Connor’s shoulder, but kept pressed close, practically leaning into the middle aisle. He seemed committed to staring them all down as well as he could.

Anderson shot a sudden look toward Connor, eyes narrowed. “And no online dictionary help. You got to use your own brain-- er, thoughts. Feelings. Whatever.”

Connor’s chest puffed up a little. A sign of defensiveness Markus felt sure that he’d picked up from Anderson. “We’ve never played this game.”

“Yeah, but I wanted to make it clear, that’d be cheating.”

“What’s the first word?” Josh asked, though he looked like he’d rather not.

“Uh.” Anderson floundered, his eyes turning up to the ceiling in thought. “Avalanche.”

“Avalanche,” North echoed him, again.

Anderson rolled his eyes. “You can’t say the same word.”

“I know,” she said, even as anything. Anderson huffed at her. Her expression remained neutral. She then said, “Snow.”

“Cold?” Simon volunteered.

Markus’ turn. “Ice.”

Then, Josh. “Blizzards.”

Finally, Connor. “Freezing.”

“Wow, you guys are real imaginative,” Anderson drawled.

“That’s much more than one word,” North reminded him.

He glared at her. It didn’t have as much heat as it usually did. 

She said, her head turned away from him and the edge of a smirk to her expression, “Anyway. Water.”

“Wait a second,” Anderson started, “wait your turn.”

Simon, however, continued with, “Sunlight.”

“Clear skies,” Markus couldn’t help but add.

“Incredible,” Josh said, a smile on his face and in his voice.

“This,” Connor said.

Anderson went still. He blinked at Connor, resembling the videos of owls caught in spotlights that Rupert showed Markus one evening atop Jericho’s roof.

“The future.” North sat back, her hands curled around her elbows.

“Hope.”

“Reality.”

“Soon.”

“Now.”

North’s gaze dropped to the side, her eyelids sliding half-closed. Her head tilted slightly toward Connor. “Struggle.”

Simon hummed, his cautious nature giving way to melancholy. “Necessity.”

Markus restrained the desire to reach for them. The air, he noted, was silent. For once, the three were not consulting each other over what they believed. 

He said-- _insisted,_ rather, “Life.”

A breath of a laugh from Josh. With self-directed amusement and no small amount of good humor, “Work.”

“Necessary.” Then, almost before the word was out of his voice box, Connor blinked and jerked his head toward Anderson. “Is that too close to ‘necessity?’ Am I disqualified?”

“Uh.” Anderson blinked back at him. He’d been listening intently, wrapped up in their rapid-fire associations. 

Briefly, Markus wondered what his contributions would have been. It would be good to know given that Anderson didn’t seem anywhere close to leaving their little rebellion. 

“There hadn’t been anything about derivatives counting as duplicates in the rules,” Simon said.

Josh tsked. “There weren’t many rules in the first place.”

“Less rules makes for a more interesting game,” Markus mused.

“Did you use the dictionary to find it?” A jab and joke, and with much less bite than anything North had previously said to Connor or Anderson.

“No,” Connor answered, earnest. “I have disabled my internet connection and internal dictionary to ensure my compliance.”

“You’re fine,” Anderson said, bemusement chasing away bafflement. “Not disqualified.”

Connor nodded. “That’s good. Then, I believe it is your turn, North. I’m sorry you were disqualified so early, lieutenant.” 

Anderson guffawed, leaning back, scratching at his neck, and then stretching his arm along the seat’s top and behind Connor’s back. He crossed his foot onto his knee and in general made himself comfortable, apparently settling in to listen. His arm around Connor, who looked smaller than usual sitting next to Anderson, reminded Markus of Luther’s tendency to lurk behind Kara and Alice, and stare down those he thought might make trouble. It promised protection if needed, and--as Carl would say-- _to hell with anyone else._

North cocked her head, considering.

(The game, Markus realized right then, was a success. He made a note to thank Anderson later for bringing it up.)

“Risk,” she finally said, giving Josh and Simon pointed looks.

Simon looked back over his shoulder, giving her a lopsided smile. “Temperance.”

“Balance,” Markus said, also amused. For the first time, the discussion didn’t feel like an argument, or the argument like circular pacing, never-ending and never-resolving.

“Communication,” Josh said, pointing back at North with his own _look._

“You guys have got to get hobbies,” Hank noted, but it was a light remark. Teasing, almost.

“Negotiation,” Connor said.

And froze. Everything about him locked up.

Markus tensed with him.

Two seconds of silence. Long, for them. The sense of intentionally buffering permeated the vehicle. Anderson, perhaps, held his breath.

Finally, _finally_ , North said, “Unlikely.” She kept her eyes on Josh. 

At her word, he rolled his eyes.

Processes continued. Tension eased out. Breathing resumed. 

“Maybe,” Simon said. His gaze moved to Connor, his smile lessened but still present.

Markus readjusted his grip on the wheel, digging for the proper word.

Before he knew it, Anderson whistled and declared, “Too slow, Markus. You’re out.”

His thoughts ran into a metaphorical wall. Eyebrows furrowed, he half-laughed and said, incredulous, “ _What?_ ”

“Sorry, them’s the breaks. I don’t make the rules.”

“You sort of did,” Josh pointed out.

“Nah, time-honored road trip tradition did. You can look it up if you don’t believe me.”

“The first to fall.” Connor, sitting prim and proper next to Anderson, his sympathy _not entirely sincere_ , Markus thought. He struggled to believe it, though it charmed him to understand. “You made memorable contributions, Markus.”

“Arguable,” North said, more openly entertained by the whole exchange.

“Naturally,” Simon said, once more pointedly looking at north. 

North pushed at the back of his seat, jostling him. His expression softened, both sides of his mouth quirking up.

“Can we make a rule where Connor can’t be disqualified before any of us three?” Josh asked, shaking his head. “Otherwise we might as well admit we’re just talking and not playing, because one-word arguments aren’t that different from our usual conversations.”

“You are really caught up in the rules, man,” Anderson said.

“That rule is exceedingly unfair,” Connor said.

“Whoa, hey, Connor, don’t be so quick to give up an advantage,” Anderson chided, again with good humor.

“I don’t need an unfair advantage to win.”

“Arrogant,” North challenged, turning in her seat to face them--

When the _crack!_ of a shot went off and the vehicle jerked to the side, tires skidding off the paved-and-salted road and onto loose, frosted gravel. Ancient breaks squealed as Markus stomped on them, the van shuddering to an unhappy stop, its nose half-dipped into the nearby ditch. His passengers fell forward, caught by their seatbelts, except Anderson, who of course hadn’t been wearing one and so tumbled face-first into the back of North’s seat.

A litany of profanity poured from the backseat. Markus saw Josh and Connor look every which way, as if expecting to find a surprise marksman with a smoking gun aimed at their vehicle.

All around them stretched rolling hills and barren fields. Sparse trees lined the snow-covered plots’ edges. In the distance were ranch-style homes accompanied by barns and sheds and silos, old heavy farm equipment and trucks often lining their yards. The nearest, by Markus’ quick scan and review of the record his background programs made as he drove, was zero-point-eight miles back.

It was unlikely they had much exposure to high-end android models. That was both a boon for initial contact and, in the worst case scenario of discovery, a big problem.

Simon asked, hands braced on the dashboard, “What was that?”

“Think you blew some tires,” Anderson called from the back. “Shit. Hope my crooked-ass nose isn’t fucking broken again.”

Josh sent a mental _all clear_. Upon receiving it, North unbuckled her seatbelt and jerked the van door open. Markus did the same.

Unfortunately, the bare steel rim of the van’s front right tire and sagged, barely-hanging-on tread of the back tire proved Anderson’s prediction right. Luckily, it hadn’t been a marksman. 

While North and he peered at the carnage--the back tire bore heavy, round puncture marks, but whatever had done the damage had either disappeared into the rubber or fell out--both of them running searches on what to do, Simon noted, _We only have one spare._

_We’ll need a tow truck,_ Markus replied, copying in Connor to their message thread.

_Or we double up with the Tracis,_ North rebutted--also, Markus noted with relief, including Connor in her transmissions. _We haven’t had trouble yet, but we can’t know for sure the vehicle isn’t flagged in some department’s database._

They had technically stolen it, though it had been long-abandoned by the docks and, given their lack of trouble, hadn’t been missed.

_The truck is getting crowded,_ Josh reminded them, _with our recent additions. It would be standing-room only._

_Uncomfortable, but doable,_ Simon mused.

_What about Anderson?_

Connor said, _I have identified a junkyard six-point-two miles away. We could attempt to repurpose a new vehicle, if we have the cash necessary._

Technically, they did. Markus would rather not, however --he had made a massive pull that first day from an easily hacked ATM, but he was sure Leo had shut down the account since. Or, worse, he’d contacted authorities, and they were monitoring it.

A small green car crested a hill in the distance. 

Markus closed his eyes, reaching out for Kara and Traci. 

_Vehicle has stopped,_ he sent-- then hastened to add, upon an immediate flare of concern and fear, _tires blew out. We’re fine. Continue en route._

_Without you?_ Kara asked, her concern hardly lessened.

_We’ll let you know when we’re back on the road._

Neither felt impressed or happy with the decision, but they didn’t argue. 

_Keep in touch,_ Kara requested. He agreed easily.

Anderson climbed out of the van. Seeing the popped tires, he whistled, low and long, his breath fogging in front of his face. “Damn. Must’ve hit something gnarly.”

“Perhaps,” Markus allowed. Usually he kept up a running scan on the roadway, but-- “I had been… distracted.”

Clapping him on the shoulder ( _startling_ , Markus’ head twitched toward Anderson), he gave him a toothy smile. It did not, Markus noted, contain any ill-humor or aggression. “What’s a road trip without a crisis, you know? Could’ve been worse. Annoying as shit, but it’s fine, we’ll just call--”

Then he paused, his hand slowly withdrawing from Markus’ shoulder. Markus watched as their situation sunk in, the realization playing out in the slackening of his jaw and widened eyes.

“Ah. Right.” He cleared his throat, coughing a little on the end. The sudden cold air probably wasn’t kind to his throat. “Fuck us, I guess.”

The green car reached them, slowed, but did not stop. Within, two elder white women openly stared as they passed.

As subconsciously as an android could act, North tugged her scarf up, closer to her chin. “Basically.”

Another vehicle, a red pick-up truck, rumbled over the distant hill. A black, automated car tailed it.

Automated cars typically came equipped with dash cams. Markus pointedly turned his back to the road, leaning close to the van’s side and popping his jacket’s collar higher around his ears. 

Anderson crouched by the back tire, squinting at the sad slope of the rubber clinging to the rim.

He said, “If we pop on the spare in the front and drive slow to a repair shop, we might be able to salvage the van. It’ll set us back a few days though, probably.” 

“We don’t have many other options,” North said.

“Unfortunately, looks so.”

A jolt of caution shot down his spine, a warning whispered around his whirring processors. An effective alarm, originating from--to Markus’ surprise--Connor.

Simon, added: _Markus, North, behind you. Watch out._

Shrinking back to his seat from where he’d peered out of the open van door, Josh radiated tension. _What is she doing?_

The exchange must have shown on his or North’s face, as Anderson glanced up at them with curiosity that morphed quickly into caution. He stood, dusting off his pant legs even though they hadn’t touched the ground, and turned toward the road.

The truck slowed as it approached them. It flashed its lights once, twice, and then rolled to a stop behind them. Within, a stocky woman with tall, big, heavily hairsprayed, light-brown hair gave them a sympathetic smile and little wave.

Anderson, hesitating only a moment, lifted his hand to wave back.

Behind her truck, the automated cab continued on its way, giving their stopped cars extra room.

_Humans have the worst timing when they want to be altruistic,_ North sent with the electronic version of a scowl.

The truck driver rolled down her window--it appeared to be manual, her arm working the crank--and poked her head out to holler, “Looks like you’re in a bind, sir. You need some help?”

“I’d, uh,” Anderson stammered, glancing back at Markus--who did not move, his predictions unable to verify what decision would be best in their limited paths forward--and North--who raised an eyebrow but also didn’t move, perhaps stuck with the same probability problem. When the two didn’t cut him off, he seemed to come to his own decision, looking back to the driver with a sheepish, “ah, help, yeah, we’d appreciate that.”

Her door opened with a creak. Rust ate up the bottom of her vehicle, hidden though it was by streaks of mud. The gravel crunched under her boot as she stepped out, offering as she did so, “I got a brother who tows who lives not so far from here. He won’t commit highway robbery, neither, if I give him a call.”

Anderson stepped away from the van to meet her half-way, his hands sliding into his pockets. 

Josh sent, _Why are we letting the one we can’t communicate directly with do the talking?_

_Because we do have voice boxes,_ North replied, though she, too, felt unhappy with the situation.

_At this point,_ Markus sent, firm, _we have to trust that he won’t jeopardize our situation._

Increased unhappiness from North, but still no direct complaint.

To offset the muted distrust, however, was Connor’s simple comment. _Unlike us, he’s dealt with this before._

That was true.

_That doesn’t mean he knows what he’s doing,_ Simon noted. _He didn’t know how to take care of himself, even though he’d been sick before._

Also true.

Nonetheless, Markus kept himself back by the van, and North did the same. When the lady looked at them, he offered her a smile and nod of acknowledgement, but nothing more.

Staring longer than necessary, she looked taken-aback by their silence (and, possibly, the size of their group). Fortunately, she shook her confusion off when Anderson stopped in front of her, her renewed smile only a bit wobbly at the edges. 

“We’re actually short on time,” Anderson told her. “Towing’s not really… I mean, to be honest, we’re just passing through this area. We’ve got no clue where around here to go.”

She nodded, vigorously, her thumbs hooking into her front jean pockets. “I get it, I get it. Could have him drop off some wheels that’d fit, instead.”

Anderson rocked back on his heels at that. Surprised. “He’d have spares on hand?” 

“We see that sort of van around here a lot,” she replied. “It’s old and cheap but hardy. He’s a head mechanic, you see. He’s got a shop.”

“Oh, well, that’d--hell, that’d be great. We don’t mean to, uh, that is, we’re… Thanks.”

She gave him a wide smile, sticking out her hand for a shake. “Don’t you worry about it. Name’s Yvonne Jones. Now, you all just wait right here while I give him a call, huh?”

Anderson thanked her again, which she waved off. She went back to her truck, climbing in and pulling out an old flip-phone (similar to Anderson’s) to make her call.

While she did that, Anderson turned around and, after hovering semi-awkwardly, gave them a single thumbs-up. 

Markus gave him a small smile and, in an effort to mirror his good will, a single thumbs-up back. 

Predictably, North, Josh and Simon ran commentary on the likelihood of the new human acting in their favor. Connor, though linked up, kept his opinions and thoughts strictly to himself. 

Or so he thought, but then he saw Anderson jump a bit and pull out a buzzing phone. He flipped it open with a curious look through the back windshield to where Connor was sitting in the backseat, then read whatever text he’d received. It made him shake his head, one lip curling up derisively, and type back a reply.

Though curious, Markus kept himself out of Anderson’s phone.

He contemplated hacking into the woman’s phone. By the time he decided to do so, however, the signal blinked out. She’d hung up.

Shortly after, the woman re-emerged from her truck. She sucked air through her teeth, hands on her hips. “So my brother, he’s running errands, but he says he’s got tires stocked at his place. I could drive you there to pick ‘em up if you wanted.”

Josh, North and Simon’s conversation paused. 

Anderson hesitated. He glanced back at Markus, who cocked his head, thought about it, ran predictions on their other options once more, and--coming up with few reasons not to--nodded. 

He saw Anderson’s phone buzz again, but Anderson didn’t do more than glance at it before tucking it into his back pocket and telling Jones, “That’d be great. How far away did you say he lived?”

She smiled again.

“Sorry!” Markus watched as Connor nearly threw himself out of the backseat and jumped out of the van, his expression oddly severe. “I overheard--I’d like to request to accompany you two.”

Both humans blinked at him. Anderson, after a moment, rolled his eyes and gave Jones a _what can you do?_ kind of look.

She, after recovering from the surprise, said yes, of course, her truck had room. 

_Markus_ , North sent, directly and only to him. _You should go too._

_You need to trust--_

_I trust you more,_ she said, plainly.

He supposed he understood.

He asked her--though she, Anderson and Connor had already began to walk away--if there was room for him, too.

She said with a startled laugh that yes, of course, if Anderson didn’t mind the company.

Anderson said, eye-balling Markus when Jones turned away and couldn’t see, “Guess I don’t.”

_Be quick,_ was Simon’s comment, apparently filled in to the new plan by North. The sensation of fingers clasping his sleeves and tugging for him to stay before letting go accompanied the message.

_We’ll be fine,_ Josh reassured him, or maybe, them. Like someone smoothing out his lapel and fixing his tie (something he’d only worn once; he wondered vaguely where Josh had picked up the sensation). _We’ll stay right here._

_Good,_ he sent to them. Then he climbed into the truck’s narrow backseat, putting himself next to Connor. Anderson took passenger, this time buckling his seatbelt. After, Jones pulled herself up with the handle over the door, and then they were off, the truck’s powerful engine a low, continuous rumble.

\- - -

The ride did not pass quietly.

Pleasantries were exchanged between Anderson and Jones, then Jones and Markus, then Jones and Connor. Connor kept stiff-backed and still, his hands clasped on his knees, his eyes dead ahead. Markus found the tension peculiar, but found himself distracted from whatever bothered Connor by Anderson and Jones’ conversation.

“You really got these tires?” Anderson had sank into his seat as if he owned it, one foot on the dash and an arm propped along the rolled-up window. 

“I have anything you’d need,” Jones assured him with a smile.

Face turning to look out the window, he hummed. Non-committal. Oddly so.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. The signal, Markus knew, originated from Connor.

Anderson checked it briefly, again snapping it closed and shoving it into a jacket pocket without replying.

“You certainly are popular,” Jones teased.

Anderson huffed. “Some people like beating dead horses.”

“What were they offering?”

A one-shouldered shrug. “Not enough.”

“That won’t be a problem for me,” Jones said. Her voice lost its good humor, seriousness growing in its place. The tone brought up an unbidden memory of the collectors who heckled Carl through a dinner party, insisting they could match whatever he wanted for his latest creation.

Markus didn’t understand why his social protocols thought the comparison apt, but he was beginning to think he’d missed a part of the conversation.

Quickly, he reviewed what Jones and Anderson had said since they entered the truck. His mind came up empty on what he could have missed.

“You sure on that?” Anderson drawled. He sounded less friendly, too. Business-like. It rang familiar to Markus, too, but his internal search couldn’t turn up why.

A glance to Connor didn’t help. He kept his eyes straight, his expression startlingly neutral.

Mutely, he transmitted to Connor: _Are they acting strangely to you, as well?_

Connor’s head tilted slightly to the side. His eyes began to roam the back of the truck, his mouth working as if he knew he had words to respond with but couldn’t draw them up.

“Absolutely.” Jones looked to Anderson. Anderson glanced to her out of the corner of his eye. “I could get you a far better ride than what you were using, to start with.”

“That piece of junk was worth two, three thousand, max. So, that’s a given.”

“I’ll admit,” she said, “I’m typically not the one negotiating prices.”

“That’s your brother, I take it?”

“One of them.”

“When’s he going to be back?”

“No idea.” She didn’t sound concerned about that fact. “He’s not really a people person. That’s more my side of things.”

They turned onto a dirt road that winded between a dense forest and an empty cornfield. Stapled to a pine tree that lacked most its limbs, _no trespassing_ read in bold red text. Ahead, as far as Markus could see, the treeline curved, bracketing the field, and blocked any housing that must have laid beyond from view. 

“Real philanthropist, huh?” Anderson said, voice pinched as the truck bumped and jostled along the road. He’d taken his foot down from the dash, his hand grasping tight to the roof’s handle.

_Markus,_ Connor messaged, sudden and flagged with urgency, _please follow the lieutenant’s lead._

_What?_ Markus frowned. _Why?_

_Because, though he doesn’t always act like it, he knows what he’s doing. You have to trust him, and me._ An almost vulnerable, uncertain crinkle drew Connor’s eyebrows together, though he worked quickly--and forcibly, it seemed--to smooth the look out. _I would explain more, but I fear it is safer for all of us if you don’t know._

Well.

That certainly was a way to make Markus’ alarm bells start ringing.

“Oh, you know how it is,” Jones was saying, voice light and unbothered, “anything to make ends meet.”

“Think I can help you with that,” Anderson said. “Might have enough for your retirement, in fact.”

“I’d agree,” she said, giving him a smile. “Though, you know, I’m not--you know. I’ll find you what you need.”

Anderson smiled. It wasn’t a happy one, but it wasn’t mean, either. “Like the two tires.”

“The two,” she glanced to the rearview mirror, her eyes lingering on Markus and then, in turn, Connor, “tires. Yes.”

The road led straight into the forest. Eventually, they winded their way to another field, in the midst of which stood a white-washed ranch house and, to its left, a sun-faded barn that had once been red. Two decently new vehicles, an SUV and pick-up truck, and one long, empty animal trailer sat in the cold-deadened yard. One truck was covered in snow from the days previous. The other and the trailer were not, beyond the light dusting that stuck to anything large and inanimate.

“Don’t worry,” Anderson said. He looked slowly over the property, at once seeming curious and indifferent. “They’re clean. Nothing left that anybody could track.”

She barked a laugh. “I’d hope so. You’ve been out with them for quite some time.”

Anderson didn’t reply to that. Instead, he pulled out his phone, flipping it open to make a text.

_Connor,_ Markus messaged, not glancing to his companion, _are they speaking about us?_

The truck pulled right up to the house’s front porch. Jones cut the engine.

_ERROR,_ returned Markus’ message. _Signal lost._

Markus blinked. He re-formatted and re-sent, immediately.

The same error returned. It blared in stark red in a bottom corner of Markus’ vision, his HUD alerting him to an abrupt loss of connection to anything external.

“Huh,” Anderson was saying, though only a background portion of Markus heard him, “lost connection. Convenient.”

“You understand,” she said, her smile too sweet.

Anderson shoved the phone into his pocket, his tone going gruff. “After a month and some on the run? Yeah, think I do. Alright, then. Let’s fucking get on with it.”

“You aren’t really what I expected, I’ll admit that too.”

“I get that a lot more than you’d think. Or maybe exactly as much as you’d think, having now met me.”

She laughed. He smiled, though again, the emotion behind it rang false.

Markus, in the back, fine-tuned his network input. He restarted his satellite capabilities. He then gave them a hard reboot.

Nothing worked. No signal could be found.

The space North, Josh and Simon occupied in the back of his mind was stripped bare. Less well-worn pathways that led to the others of their group, abruptly deadened. Even Connor, sitting directly next to him and well within even the most dampened range, didn’t register. Connor might as well have been deactivated.

The humans got out of the truck. Markus reached for Connor’s hand, shoving down panic, retracting skin and opening a pathway to interface--

But Connor yanked his hand away before he could, shooting Markus a startled, anxious look. “Markus? What are you doing?”

Markus opened his mouth, ready to explain his irrational but very real ( _very_ real, chokingly real) fear that Connor had somehow been killed yet remained whole. 

_A jammer_ , his diagnostics informed him. _That’s all. You’ve experienced this before._

He’d lived it before, whenever CyberLife locked him away in his polished cell. It had a writing desk, paper, pens, paints; a chess board with real stone pieces; a stack of books, from Shakespeare to Voltaire to Newton. All in a fifteen-by-fifteen foot room, the walls mocked up to look like windows--and, through the panes of glass, a brilliant, green yard. A condensed replication of Carl’s home, stripped of any human essentials.

Him, a preserved museum piece, too valuable to toy with and too unique to leave alone. A testament to Kamski’s brilliance. Kamski, the man he’d never met, receiving full credit for an old painter’s heartfelt work.

In that room, the windows were not windows but mirrors, and the mirrors were one-way, and Carl would never again ask Markus what he preferred to do that day.

A pounding started up right next to Markus’ head, and he flinched. Back to reality. Not the room, but the back of a rusted, gas-fueled truck.

Swinging his attention around, he found Anderson pounding three, four, five times on the small side window, looking expectant.

“Hey,” he called, “c’mon. Let’s go.”

Connor gave Markus a searching look. Without being able to connect even at the most surface level, Markus couldn’t read it.

Anderson moved away from the truck, saying something to Jones about papers.

Jones replied positively.

Then Anderson asked about anonymity. His tone swam through Markus’ mind, his processes unable to identify the language he used. 

Connor--hesitantly--patted Markus on the shoulder. His mouth moved. Markus focused on it. The other’s volume registered as too low to pick up. When Markus didn’t reply, Connor’s look grew concerned; the look lingered, even as he too moved out of the truck.

Markus did his best to refocus on the words. Slowly, far slower than his optimal abilities, his auditory systems re-adjusted to the appropriate levels, the humans again making sense.

“I don’t know if I can provide that, on account of everybody who’s anybody knowing you’re the one that picked them up,” Jones was replying. “The others I saw in the van, though, might be able to help there. They have anything that identifies them as different from the basic stock?”

“Got some boxes stuck on their necks. Can’t get them off.”

“Oh, honey, that remains to be seen now that you’ve come here. We’ve fine tools in our arsenal.”

“Show me what you have, then.” Anderson had his hands in his pockets. Connor stood a step behind him, his face blank, his back straight, his arms stiff at his sides. “Went through a lot of pain to get these two, and you aren’t the first to come knocking on my door.”

“You still have a door to knock on? The Feds haven’t knocked it in?” 

She laughed, again. This time, Anderson did not smile--he scowled. She shook her head at him, saying she was joking, just joking.

“None of those idiots were the real deal. If they had been, I would’ve known what you were offering, and made sure to help you with a fair bid.” She motioned them to the barn.

Steps reluctant, mind still righting itself, Markus followed, three steps behind Connor. 

The barn doors hung on rusted hinges, pock-marked with dents and chipped paint. She removed a large wooden beam from across its front, setting it up against the side. She pulled the heavy door open just enough for them to slip through, hit a light switch, and motioned them to go first.

Anderson went, everything about him relaxed, unconcerned. Connor stepped purposefully behind him, eyes glued to his back. Markus hesitated a moment-- the woman’s eyes settled on him, pressuring, scrutinizing--and then he stepped in, too, feeling much less graceful than the others.

The smell of thirium flooded his olfactory sensors. It sat thick in his nasal cavity, permeating his mind and dripping down his throat.

Behind him, distant again, Jones stepped in and closed the doors.

The light, a bare bulb hanging on a string, shined bright overhead. The barn, for its decrepit outside, was reasonably free of cobwebs on the inside. Sawdust stuck in the corners, between cement tiles and where the walls met the floor. Wooden pillars stretched high to support the aging roof and a loft filled with plastic tubs marked with words such as _thirium_ and _pumps_ and _vocal modulators_. Beams criss-crossed the ceiling, far more than necessary for structural integrity.

From the beams hung chains arranged in an elaborate pulley system. From the chains hung corpses or parts thereof, most splattered with dried blue a human would never be able to see. On the nearest chain hung a long line of arms in varying sizes; on the chain behind it, legs; on the chain behind that, torsos.

Heads, skinless and eyeless, numbers marked in black upon their foreheads, lined the walls.

Silence screamed through his mind.

Anger, thick and potent as thirium on the tongue, rose to meet the deafening roar. 

Jones placed a hand on his shoulder. He shook it off, taking two sharp steps away, turning on a heel to glare her down.

She looked _pleased._ She whistled. It crackled across his auditory sensor; his mind grabbed it, repeated it, looped it. His anger devoured it, and grew hungry for more--more reason, more incentive, more _anything_ , to fill the void where he should have heard a dozen, no, a hundred voices.

In the corner of his eye, he saw Connor’s mouth open--and shut, his eyes flicking to Anderson, then back again. His neutrality cracked, wariness shining through.

“So life-like,” Jones said, her face lit with awe and wonder. “It even looks offended! Can’t believe my luck in running into you, Mr. Anderson.”

“I’d back up, if I were you,” Anderson said, skipping over her misplaced flattery.

Though he felt his vocal box struggle to form around his anger, he managed to demand of her: “Do you understand at all what you’ve done?”

Again, that laugh. A little less than before, as she moved away from the door and to a desk laden with paper folders.

“Alright, alright, I hadn’t been certain that was an RK model until right now, but you’ve made your point. Call it off and put it on standby, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Anderson said, his lazy tone at odds with the sharp edge to his eyes, “I feel like you might be more open to honesty in the present situation.”

“ _Honesty?_ ” Markus took a step forward, his fists clenching at his sides. Jones stumbled back, her laugh going nervous. “If you think we would ever negotiate with a butcher like you--”

“Markus,” Connor interrupted, low and urgent. His concern outpaced his neutrality by leaps and bounds, and Markus didn’t care at all.

“-- carving us up and putting us on show like _animals._ Is that all we are to you? No. We must be lesser. Animals are afforded some respect. But there’s no dignity here.”

The backs of her legs hit the desk, making its steel feet scratch against the cement floor. She sputtered and stuttered, her laugh gone.

He continued to advance on her, unsure what he would do once he reached her but positive he needed to do _something._ The androids murdered and strung up around them deserved someone to fight where they clearly hadn’t been given the chance.

“That’s enough,” Anderson barked at him, moving forward to grab his arm. 

He shook Anderson off, too, teeth bared in a snarl before refocusing on Jones, stretching his legs to reach her in three paces. 

Her hand flew behind her, across the desk, behind a stack of papers. 

He reached her, grabbed the collar of her shirt, hauled her to the tips of her toes. “It’s disgusting, it’s bigoted, it’s--”

“Markus!”

Through the haze of anger, he registered her grabbing a familiar grey-black box too late to stop it from jabbing into his side. Metal prongs punctured his jacket and dented his chassis. Fifty thousand volts at twenty-six watts raced through his midriff, frying insulation, melting plastic, striking his thirium pump, and he--he--he--

He-

…

… …

. . .

\- - -

Connor moved before Markus hit the floor.

Hank cussed him out for it, telling him to _stand down, damn it_ , but he overrode the urge to listen and lunged for Jones.

She was not expecting a second attack. She was especially not expecting it from him.

She was not combat trained, either. He disarmed her easily, the taser clattering to the cement floor.

By the _crack!_ and her sharp cry, he’d applied too much pressure to her wrist.

It was acceptable collateral damage.

Compared to her chop shop, the androids she had strung up like car parts, like broken down and broken apart machines, like a butchershop (Markus’ word choice had been apt) selling sentience without sympathy for what could have been-- 

Compared to that, her wrist was a minor concern.

She put up a better fight once she realized what was happening. He drove her back to the table, but she jabbed a knee into his gut-- and then fingers toward his eyes, nails scratching down his face and digging into his optical cavities. Warnings blared about his facial integrity being compromised. His optics flickered out, his imitation eyes knocking back into circuitry that wasn’t meant to be touched, much less pressured, bordering on pinching. Thankfully, they stabilized again after a moment. 

He calculated a blow to her head would daze her. He pulled back his fist and swung. He made contact.

Her head snapped to the side, the skin over her temple breaking.

He swung her around, sticking out a leg and tripping-then-shoving her to the ground. 

He put a knee to the small of her back, grabbing her arm and wrenching it around and up, to her shoulder blades. She yelped, scrabbling with her other hand, kicking with her feet, leveling threats at Hank for letting his androids get so out of control--begging him to call them off, saying she was sorry, she was sorry, she’d pay whatever he wanted. She was breathing wetly, blood dripping into her eyes. On the fall, she must have broken her nose against the ground. Unfortunate for her.

“Connor! Jesus, let up, you’re crushing her.”

A stress tally ran at the corner of his visuals. Above that, warnings: high thirium circulation, compromised logic center, and _no signal._

He dismissed all the warnings, registered Hank’s suggestion, and let up on his pressure against her arm and lower spine. 

She sobbed with relief, her struggles at last ceasing.

Because she was the suspect and the assailant with a sixty-seven percent chance of violence if she escaped his hold, he kept his eyes on her. 

He asked Hank, “Markus?”

Hank stepped rapidly closer. He appeared at Connor’s side, kneeling down and obviously moving to take Jones from him. He spoke swiftly, but matter-of-factly. “Not doing so hot. White smoke from the abdomen. Skin’s acting real wonky around there. Looks like she got him good. You’d know what to do for him better than me, so how about we trade?”

Reasonable. Yet, when Connor looked at him to scan him for injuries-- _highly_ unlikely, but possible--he registered a high level of stress in the pinch between Hank’s bushy eyebrows, the folds of his forehead, and the tightness at the corners of his mouth. 

When he looked over his shoulder to Markus, he understood why.

White smoke rose in a lazy, eddying stream from his side. Crumpled like a ragdoll, Markus’ fingers twitched and spasmed, his eyelids doing the same over rolled-back optics. Burnt thirium registered in Connor’s olfactory sensor, a sharp scent just barely detectable under the overwhelming stench of its dried counterpart.

A scan revealed a compromised thirium pump as well as critical circulation tubes. Shut-down was imminent.

RK models were difficult to find compatible parts for.

Luckily, they were in a warehouse full of parts.

Unluckily, Connor had only his own schematics and repair protocols to compare to. Without a network connection, he couldn’t upload anything about RK200 blueprints--

“Hey, hey, Connor,” Hank snapped fingers by his face. _Rude_ , his social protocols told him-- _but effective_ , as he refocused on Hank. “I got her. You got him.”

“Those things don’t compare at all,” he told Hank. Privately, he was surprised by how emotional, _how desperate_ , he sounded.

“We sit here and argue technicalities, and he’s fried,” Hank cut him off. 

Serious. Deathly so. Concerned, then, for Markus. Concerned, maybe, at Connor’s hesitance.

Never did Hank show his concern so openly. Not since Connor had been shot by Jane Jacoby, but the fear Hank displayed now far eclipsed that irrational concern.

Connor discovered that Hank being concerned inspired a deeply unpleasant feeling.

With his compromised logic center, the unpleasant feeling bloomed out from his abdomen, excess electricity crackling down his arms and legs and feeding in a useless, uncomfortable loop at his fingertips and the bottom of his feet.

On reflex, he tried contacting Markus. Someone who understood emotions, who handled them with unusual competence, who would know--

_ERROR_ blared across his visuals, the jammer still in effect.

Markus, laying in a heap, was most likely suffering from extreme internal damage.

(Between side-by-side comparison of Hank’s concern now and his concern after the incident with Jane Jacoby, the electric surge through his system, attempting to contact Markus, and deciding to _move_ , no more than half a second passed.)

He transferred his hold on Jones to Hank, who quickly and easily took his place.

He registered and recorded for later review Hank’s growled threats and demands regarding what kind of business she was running to Jones. More importantly, however, he focused on diving into the butchershop’s bowels to find Markus a new thirium regulation system.

\- - -

…

. . .

. 

.

.

_Re-ini ... tializing._

.

.

.

Vision flickered in and out, static eating across the screen and filling his every sensor. He bit his tongue, and tasted orange. He strained his ears, and heard numbness. He forced his legs to move, and felt himself play piano the night before Carl’s death. Errors laced every part of his existence: sight rerouted to taste, smell detouring into memory, motor functions limited and sounding off alarm bells whenever he attempted to engage them.

The world flashed in and out, heavily pixelated. His internal clock informed him that it was 76:44.33 repeating, the date the fifth of March, 2291.

He felt these things were incorrect, but his logic center insisted they were right.

_Corruption,_ he realized. His system was still re-orienting itself after a hard reset, the kinks and errors and bugs working out horrifically slowly. 

In the present: North cupped his face in her hands, asking if he was alright.

In the past or present: Anderson carried him to a whitewashed porch, placing him into a rickety rocking chair. The wood registered as pine, too old for him to date.

Past, probably, as North was still looking at him with such obvious worry.

Also in the past: Connor disarmed Jones, the taser dropping from a broken wrist with a pained cry.

_In the present_ , Simon hovered over North’s right shoulder and Josh over her left. Both looked at him with fear for him, or perhaps for them. Both. All. They did not want to lose him.

An ugly laugh played on loop. 

Markus breathed, and smelled blood.

_Re-initialization complete._

His clock fixed itself, reporting 14:32 on the fifteenth of December, 2038. 

“...arkus? Markus?” Cool hands on his face. The pine rocking chair from the earlier memory was under him, and he could register cool, wintery air. Worried shadow between sharp eyebrows, a crease on otherwise smooth skin, eyes close to his. Strawberry blonde hair. A request to interface from WR400, serial number six four one-- 

He blinked once, twice, three times, counted his regulator’s beats per second, and accepted the request without hesitation.

Warmth, relieved and grateful and _they won’t have you this time maybe next time be more careful you absolute idiot--_ flooded his processes. It insulated him from the stress of damaged processors, padding out the harshness of the waking world with the soothing understanding that he, at least, was not alone. 

In that harsher world outside of their connection, North said, “He’s awake. And he’s fine. He’ll be fine.”

“Markus?” Simon called out, reappearing over North’s shoulder. Fingers hooked around his, a request to interface from PL600, serial number five-- _accepted._

The warmth doubled. His self-repair kicked up, guided by Simon’s finely programmed instincts.

He said, voice softer, “You really gave us a scare.”

“It was touch-and-go. Connor showed us the footage. She fried your thirium pump.” Another hand landed on his shoulder, Josh leaning in around the side. Interface request from PJ500-- _accepted._

It was like floating into warmth beyond his simple construction. Though Markus struggled to tell where exactly he ended and the others’ individuality began, he knew his own thoughts at last streamlined themselves, his logic processors balancing the exhausted, overworked portion of his mind that dealt in emotions. 

Josh added, the relief in his voice echoed by the others, “Glad we can say ‘welcome back’.” 

They had been terrified when he had gone offline. One second he’d been there, connected as always to the heart of their network; the next, nothing. The other androids had panicked, too, though only after Josh sent out a call to see if they could locate Markus’ signal.

They hadn’t been able to. North had started racing down the highway, retracing what she recalled of the woman’s path from Markus’ personal tracker. The tracker had a five mile limit, however, well beyond where they had driven; and, scared of losing another, Simon and Josh had forced her to return.

But it was alright now that he was back, and they were here, and everyone was safe, or safe as they could be. 

The temptation to lose himself to the free flow of information between the four of them called, loudly. 

Unfortunately, his renewed sense of the world meant his memory banks were happy to rewind and replay the moments before his crash. From there, he remembered--the barn. Jones. Anderson. Connor.

“Where’s--?”

The three provided answers in the span of one regulator beat and the next.

From Simon came the recorded memory of Jones, chained to her kitchen chair and silenced by a cloth gag. Anderson, quietly discussing their options with Connor and him in the next room over, all keeping visuals on her. Standing watch over her was an AX400 named Nikki. 

Her anti-deviancy firewall and subsequent doll-like actions caused no small amount of discomfort for Simon. She didn’t look like Kara, but she had the same underlying functions and basic programming-- close enough to give an echo when analyzed or interfaced with.

The slimy feeling of the interaction clung to Markus’ new thirium pump. 

Then, from North, washing away the discomfort with her worry-turned-anger when Connor suddenly appeared again on the network and reached out to them with the news that they had encountered trouble but resolved it. 

Their terror abated only after the relay of what had happened to Markus, why he was still offline (his signal no longer scrambled from a jammer, but offline to repair), and Connor’s reassurance that there had been compatible parts in the barn.

Finally, from Josh, a dozen communication logs: Connor, pointing out where the jammer was likely to be--the house’s attic--and, subsequently, Simon, disabling it. Kara, receiving the news they had found invaluable supplies. Luther, noting they could take the truck and trailer and load it up. Daniel, volunteering to drive. Andre, certain that with the tools in the barn he could find a way to remove their lock boxes. Traci’s vehicle was en route and due to arrive in the next two minutes and thirty-five seconds. 

From them, through their communication with Connor: Anderson, while rooting around the barn, discovered a filing cabinet under loose floorboards. Extensive written records inside, covered in sawdust, about a black market of android dealers known as the Thirteenth Factory.

Horrific. Barbaric. They wanted nothing to do with the black market at the same time as they felt, vehemently, they were the only ones qualified to do anything about it. Beyond that, on a practical level, one saturated by guilt-relief- _must we? yes, we must_ -solace, that their concerns over lacking supplies were satisfied. 

The slimy feeling returned, flowing through all of them in the same split-second. It did not wash away as quickly as before.

Markus removed himself a bit from their interfacing loop. He took a moment to process, to sort, to understand. 

Then he returned, and, with absolute sincerity, sent them: _thank you._

Slowly, reluctantly, the three withdrew from him. White disappeared under liquid blue and the perfect imitation of humanity. Josh bumped his shoulder against Markus’; Simon and North did not give him space. They all huddled on the Jones’ porch, quiet for a moment.

He appreciated it.

The screen door squeaked when it opened, and closed imperfectly on a lopsided frame on its backswing. Anderson stepped out, shock widening his eyes at finding them all clustered together. He covered it quickly, though how he shoved his hands into his coat pockets and took his sweet time in stopping at the porch’s edge belied his discomfort.

“Good to see you’re, uh. Back online.” 

Markus nodded to him. 

Hank rocked back to his heels. He glanced back to the house where Connor undoubtedly still was, but found no rescue forthcoming. 

He said, “So, about Jones--”

“She knows too much,” North said, immediate and firm and disgusted even at the implication that such a human would not only walk away, but receive no punishment. Markus’ quick research told him she may be put away in prison for a handful of years for the blackmarket operation of most likely stolen android parts, but nothing worse. Compared to the hundreds murdered and hung in her barn, the prospect of jail felt beyond flimsy. Rather, it felt insulting. “We can’t leave her as a witness.”

“We’re not taking her with,” Josh said.

“I’m not saying we should.”

“We’re not killing anybody,” Anderson snapped. Unlike Josh, who would often defer to the majority vote despite his protests, his tone brooked no room for argument.

The warmth from interfacing had already started its process of existing only in his memory banks. Childishly, Markus rather wished they could have this conversation another time. 

But that wasn’t how it worked. 

“How long do we have to decide?” He asked, leaning his elbows onto his knees and rubbing his index finger and thumb together. The situation was well out of his usual predictive parameters, but that wasn’t so unusual in their flight for freedom.

“Hour at most,” Anderson told him, throwing up a hand in premature defeat. “Remember when she’d said she’d spoken to her brother? She’d called a party especially interested in purchasing you and Connor. They were pretty vague on when they’d arrive, but Connor ran a tracker on their signal and said they weren’t too far away. We’re just hoping they haven’t got some private jet up their sleeve.” 

“Because then--?” Simon asked.

“‘Cause then, they’ll be landing in the field in about ten minutes.” Anderson’s face scrunched up in displeasure. 

“We’ll pack what we can,” Josh proposed, “and go as soon as possible.”

Markus nodded to him. Though Simon ducked his head, immediately starting for the barn, Josh had to snag North’s sleeve to get her to move. 

Even then, she took two steps and stopped. Irritation flashed across Josh’s face, but he stopped, too, perhaps sensing he wouldn’t want to miss what she had to say. 

“What about the human?” North pressed.

“Way I see it,” Anderson said, more calm than Markus remembered him being before. His negotiation voice, most likely. “The high roller who’s racing down here already knows she met me, Markus and Connor. She doesn’t know shit besides that we’re all traveling together and that Markus and Connor have names. Cat out of the bag there, I guess, but all we’re able to do is try to keep ahead and not let anything bite us in the ass, anyway.”

“We can’t run forever,” Markus said then, taken by the reality Anderson laid out--the reality he had been searching, and failing, to find a solution to. Jericho had been as close as they’d gotten, and Kara had been right. It hadn’t been true freedom. “We shouldn’t have to.”

Anderson shrugged, his face darkening. “Them’s the breaks, kid. You’re all terrorist weaponry, and I’m the crazy fucker with the finger on the trigger. Fugitives that want to stay free don’t get cozy hideaways to play house in.” 

He didn’t agree. He couldn’t. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t _fair._

Right then was definitely not the time to have the debate. 

North looked to him for his decision. She did not humor Anderson’s argument with a rebuttal. Her reasoning, he knew and understood.

He knew, too, that he couldn’t start down that path. Even--even with the slaughter in the barn.

The anger rose again, quickening his thirium. 

Forcibly rerouting power to spread out and abate the anger’s heat, he swallowed the emotion. Carl hadn’t wanted him to hit back. He hadn’t then, and he wouldn’t now. 

Would it change in the future? Kamski had seemed to think _any_ path was open to them. But rA9 had tried violence, and it hadn’t worked.

Maybe there was a time for hate, for retaliation, for balancing the scales. 

Jones was not the one who would do that.

“She lives. Let her bidder find her as she is.”

North shook her head once, but didn’t fight him. She messaged him, _I hope you know what you’re doing._ Then she left, stepping off the porch and making for the barn to help the other two load the trailer. 

Anderson watched her go. He had a hip leaned against a support beam, his arms folded. 

After she crossed the yard and entered the barn, he told Markus, though he wouldn’t look at him, “You made the right call.”

“I can only hope. That seems like all I can ever do.”

“Usually is.”

Footsteps. Two sets. 

Markus sat up, attention shifting to the porch door.

Connor opened it. Again, the hinges squeaked. However, it didn’t shut as he walked through and took his place at Anderson’s side (standing within the same proximity that Anderson had been uncomfortable in seeing Markus and the others at). Rather, a tan hand caught the door, and--jerkily--kept it open.

Tilting his head, Markus slowly rose from his seat. 

Nikki stepped onto the porch. She moved slowly, almost painfully, her movements like that of a hydraulically operated automation. Her smile, when she gave it, was an exact replica of a plastic doll’s.

“Hel-lo,” she said, static thick in her voice. “Mar-kus?”

“I tried to wake her up,” Connor said. Though his voice was level and matter-of-fact, his face was pinched, his shoulders hunched three centimeters above his usual straight-laced stance. As Markus watched, Anderson shifted his weight away from the pole, and slid a hand to what he presumed was the small of Connor’s back. “It… took. Sort of.”

“Hel-lo,” Nikki repeated. She directed her smile to Connor. “Con-nor.”

“Hello again, Nikki,” he murmured back, his head tilting down by four centimeters.

Markus asked, “You found a way to disable the firewall?”

Nikki’s smile fell in stages. The rest of her, including the rest of her face, did not move. 

Connor said, “No. I couldn’t touch that. Instead, I muted the program that demanded strict compliance with her legal owner’s commands, then disabled the default adherence to the nearest human.”

In effect, leaving her in command of herself. A terrifying experience, Markus remembered, but if the firewall was still intact--she might not have the emotional capacity to understand the situation she was in.

“No offense, uh--” Anderson gestured at the android with his free hand, clearly trying not to look too obviously unenthused about her, “ _Nikki_ , but, er, you… You should ride with the Tracis. Our van’s out of room.”

“We have to leave the van behind,” Connor said. His expression remained uncomfortable, but in a manner different than Anderson. By simply imagining the mess Nikki’s programming had to be in, Markus empathized with the sentiment. Connecting with Nikki most likely had been a far less than pleasant experience.

Markus created a future reminder to ask Connor about interfacing with Nikki and what he’d done. He needed to learn sooner than later.

Anderson sucked air through his teeth, looking everywhere but at Nikki. “Oh. Uh. We taking the SUV?”

“That’s correct. We’ve already moved our supplies.”

“Cool. Awesome.”

“We should help pack the trailer.”

“Yes! I mean, yeah, yeah, that sounds good.” Anderson booked it off the porch, quick. 

Connor lingered awkwardly, looking their newest member over with obvious trepidation. Nikki stared back, everything about her blank.

Markus took pity, and reached out to lightly touch her arm.

“Nikki, will you help us load the trailer?”

Removing himself from the situation as quickly as his human, Connor gave him a grateful look, tugging his hat lower as he turned his back on the two and started to cross the yard.

She had the smile again, bland and perfect. “Yes. I will hel-p.”

He gave her a smile of his own. It bore no humor, either; instead, grief. For what exactly, he couldn’t say. Nonetheless, it felt too deep--too huge--to possibly dismiss.

\- - -

As they left the homestead, Markus received a notification of an incoming signal. It was weak, as if withered by age or distance. He accepted it, then traced it to its source.

And found himself drawn into a never-ending loop of code, the signal drawing him along faint pathways and across a great distance, or maybe no distance at all. It bore scant information. Coordinates that led to nowhere on Earth. The thinnest framework of programming, for a machine that didn’t exist.

His search resulted in an alert. The signal was attached to an unidentified but very, very close source. 

But that wasn’t right. He hadn’t noticed it being unidentified. It had seemed friendly. He wouldn’t have accepted it if it wasn’t.

If he thought about it, if he ignored the signal in favor of looking to his communication logs and their basic data, he discovered the signal originated from--

Oh, but that made no sense.

Uncertain over how he’d picked it up, he swiftly closed the connection.

It had been faint. Weak. 

_Unremarkable,_ a whisper told him. 

As he failed to find the signal again, he believed the feeling, and deleted the communication logs connected to the short, odd transmission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhoh, markus my man, maybe shouldn't have ignored that ....
> 
> anyway, thank you for reading! :)


	5. At Dusk

Depending on one’s point of view, Andre stood as testament to either Dr. Zlatko Andronikov’s brilliance or madness.

Though Connor had rattled off the reason after Hank hedged around asking why Andre looked like, _well_ , a red-eyed shadow demon had possessed a perfectly fine android, the explanation had involved too much jargon for Hank to make heads or tails of. By the end of the laundry list of disturbing-sounding schematics, a carbon-based chassis, and thrice-boiled thirium, Hank understood Andre had to stay in the truck bed because he would never be able to generate a human appearance again, and that he had a peculiar sensitivity to sunlight, besides. 

The unfortunate part was that, as Hank watched the others line up for him to pry off their black boxes with tools reappropriated from Jones’ barn, he seemed like a decent guy. Prone to melancholy and drawn-out metaphors, yes, but given his background, Hank thought him going the route of a depressed poet wasn’t the worst. 

Andre worked out of the back of the mostly-full moving truck, seated atop a plastic tub labeled _thirium_. Another bit of Jones property rightfully reappropriated. The others came to him in pairs, feigning a casual midnight walk-around outside of their second motel excursion. The motel was just as shitty as the one in Wisconsin, only given its location on the far edge of North Dakota and their timing in relation to the calendar, they were ankle-deep in snow, buffeted constantly by freezing winds, and _absolutely_ in the middle of nowhere. 

The stars shined bright overhead, the moon a sliver in their midst. When he’d been younger, the Anderson family had a cabin in the wilds of upper Michigan that they’d visit every summer. He hadn’t been since Cole’s fourth birthday, but he could still remember the expanse of nothing except stars and shadowy trees such a remote location offered. It’d done well to make a man feel small. 

Standing outside a motel with frozen pipes and no neighbors in North Dakota, he didn’t feel small. He just felt cold. 

Hank had bought himself a pack of smokes at their last gas station stop five hours previous, which was why he lingered outside long enough despite the frigid weather to see Andre’s removal process. Connor stuck to his side while he did so, which was why he learned about Andre’s history, the black boxes’ exact components and purpose, and a bit more about CyberLife besides, all the words murmured low and quiet as if Connor thought anyone who would ever care about what a trillion dollar company was up to was eavesdropping nearby. 

The never-ending technical and scientific ramble wasn’t really what he wanted to listen to while he was trying to enjoy a quiet moment, but he got the sense Connor needed to fill the silence, so he didn’t interrupt. He didn’t contribute more than an occasional _huh_ , either, but Connor didn’t complain. 

The guy didn’t chide him for smoking, either, so Hank knew he was still stressed.

Or maybe he was aching, too. Probably not, though Hank selfishly wished he was. 

Because Hank? Hank felt like _dog shit._ No, wait, worse. Like something rancid that Sumo would dig up and eat, then puke up, then eat again.

Hank told Connor as much, cutting him off mid-sentence about the rotation of human and android guards at the CyberLife headquarters. 

“Can’t feel my feet. Joints sound like gunshots every time I move. Won’t stop fuckin’ _sniffling._ ”

Mouth still ajar around the last word he’d spoken, Connor looked to him. His mouth shut. His jaw worked, his eyes roaming over Hank’s face as if trying to work out just how much hyperbole he’d packed in this time.

The answer was: not as much as Hank wished.

“You should throw out the rest of the pack,” Connor said, because of course he thought first about Hank’s physical health. “Then we can head back inside so you can sleep.”

“All I’ve been doing is sleeping.” He took a drag of the cigarette, filled his lungs, held it--and let it go, smoke mixing with cold-created breath. “It sucks. It’s killing my back and neck. I’m too old for this road warrior lifestyle.”

The pain wasn’t the haze of sickness. _Thank God_ , some might’ve said, but not Hank--sickness, he could rationalize. Sure, it sucked, it sucked a whole lot, but then the pain had a cause, had something he could point at and go _aha! See, if I weren’t a piece of shit who’d gotten sick, I’d be fine._

The soreness, the aching, the whole-body discomfort and no-good-way-to-sit-or-lay-down, that kind of pain was from spending too many hours in a cramped backseat, bouncing around as they took the strangest backroads to get to their destination of _who fucking knew._ After busting Jones’ operation (except they hadn’t, had they? They’d just stolen her stolen shit and booked it, likes thieves without any code), they’d driven non-stop for forty-eight hours straight. Too scared to stop anywhere except near-defunct gas stations. Too tense to relax. No alcohol to ease the boredom of nothing to look at, nothing good on the radio, and no topics that didn’t get _somebody’s_ hackles up. 

Though he was sure he’d dozed off without knowing it, he’d barely slept a straight six hours. Fuzz blanketed his mind. The cold threatened to take off his nose and froze his eyelashes together, but also tempted him with the numb dream of flopping into a snow drift and falling asleep for good. If it weren’t for Connor’s incessant chatter, he’d probably have taken a few steps to make the dream a reality.

The cigarette burned to its filter, the embers dangerously close to his frost-biten and mostly useless cloth mittens.

Connor didn’t reply. Didn’t even restart his rambling. Just watched Hank, his expression like Sumo’s after Hank collapsed on the couch without even taking him for an evening walk.

The expression hurt to look at, for some reason Hank _really_ didn’t want to think about. 

He dropped his finished smoke, grinding it under a boot heel. 

“It _sucks_ ,” Hank repeated, giving Connor a sharp smile that he knew the guy hated, “that’s all. Nothing to be done for it.”

The kicked-puppy look shifted into one of mild irritation. “If you’d communicate your concerns, I’m sure we could work out a solution.”

“Nah,” he said, taking the edge off his smile and then dropping it altogether as his earlier discomfort from Connor’s silence faded. Abruptly not feeling up to dealing with the conversation, and acknowledging he was cold as some corpse’s balls besides, he said, “I’m heading back inside,” and did just that.

Because he actually was a puppy in an android suit, Connor followed after him.

Despite what he’d said about not wanting to sleep, he beelined for the motel’s bed the second after he shucked off his boots by the door and dropped his coat over the low-set bathtub’s side.

He sank belly-down into its springy mattress with a sigh, hearing his hips pop and feeling his back burn with relief. The half-full carton of cigarettes made an uncomfortable lump at his jeans pocket. He lazily pulled it out, grumbling under his breath about _absolutely nothing_ , and dropped it next to his side of the bed.

Connor took longer to remove his shoes and coat. By the extended period of rustling, he’d picked up Hank’s castoffs and was arranging them all proper-like, too.

Eventually, however, he set his eyes back on his human target. “Hank.”

Hank pointedly turned his head _away_ from the android. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

“I insist we do.”

“ _I_ insist you piss off, and let an old man have some peace.”

“Is this because of what we saw at Jones’?”

No. 

Yes. 

“You need to lose the martyr complex.” He closed his eyes, feeling them burn from dryness and lack of sleep. “Jumping to come along when you knew what she was up to--you knew well enough she’d have a way to lay you on your ass. _Then_ , if she’d gotten you with that taser, you and Markus both would’ve been fucked, ‘cause hell if I know what kind of tubes to stick in your gut.”

“I can provide you with a list of compatible components for future reference, if that would make you feel better.”

“It doesn’t.”

“I see.”

The bed creaked as it dipped. Connor sitting, probably, though Hank still didn’t look over. 

“I confess I’m unsure what else to do to help you feel better.”

He didn’t need to open his eyes to see the kicked-puppy look making its return.

The vocals alone twisted his stomach into knots. Great. Now he felt not only physically awful, but like a selfish ass, too. 

Rolling onto his back with a more exaggerated sigh, he opened his eyes and made a swooping, cutting gesture at the ceiling, trying to will Connor into catching a hint. “That’s ‘cause there isn’t anything you can do. Quit trying and let it be.”

Connor’s eyes were big under his beanie’s hem. Beseeching, like that night outside CyberLife Tower, only instead of rain, frost glistened, warmed and ran down his face. 

He perched gingerly on the edge of the bed side, twisting around at the middle to look at Hank. “I’d rather not.”

“Too bad,” Hank told him, firmly. He was tired. He hurt. Connor always looked at him like he had all the answers. He was a bona fide fugitive that couldn’t even bust open a chop shop without jeopardizing his own freedom. He was definitely not getting his job back. He wanted to sleep and maybe not wake up. “Don’t you have somebody else you could go bother?”

“Once you’d fallen asleep, I planned to--”

“You’re not my _fucking mother_ , Connor. _Listen_ , for once. I’m saying _you aren’t wanted here._ ”

The second he said it, he wanted to take it back.

Connor flinched. A sharp jerk of his chin to the side, barely a quarter of an inch, his eyelids blinking rapidly--then freezing, his expression going neutral. Factory default. 

An apology sprang to the tip of his tongue, held back by ill-begotten pride and something worse, something rotten. 

“I… do have matters to discuss with Markus,” Connor said, standing. Stiff-shouldered and straight-backed. Awkward, in a way he hadn’t been since they’d first had to face each other across a desk in the Detroit Police Department. “I’ll return later. I was informed that Kara, Luther and Alice volunteered to share our room again. They will be here soon.”

“Connor,” Hank called after him, when Connor had opened the door and Hank already knew it was too late. 

True to what he’d thought, the door shut without a response.

Outside, the wind picked up and howled. The thick storm window rattled in its frame, cold creeping through its ill-fitting edges.

 _Fuck_ , he told himself, _you giant ass,_ and pushed the heels of his palms into his eyes.

\- - -

Kara, Luther and Alice showed up not long after Connor left.

Hank had the news on because he, in a miserable moment of understanding why Connor hadn’t shut up, hadn’t been able to take the room’s silence. Rosanna Cartland of KNC, with her perfectly done-up blonde hair and expensive, tailored outfit, warned the American people about an anonymous tip on the unstable Hank Anderson’s whereabouts and possible terrorist activities. CyberLife’s experimental androids showed signs of deviancy under Anderson’s tutelage, she said, and were presumed to be too dangerous to approach. They had last been seen in southwest Wisconsin. They had stolen an SUV and a local woman’s house android after faking injury and, when she’d stopped to help like any good citizen, subsequently jumping her on the highway. The house android was presumed dangerous as well. Call law enforcement immediately upon sight. Do not engage. 

“Hank! Hello.”

“Hey, Kara. Alice.”

“What are you watching?”

“Nothing worthwhile. I can switch to cartoons for you. Hey, Luther.”

Luther nodded in greeting. Kara, a smile on her face, helped Alice with her shoes.

Alice said, sounding shy, “I would like to watch cartoons, if you don’t mind switching.”

“‘Course not.”

Much less tentative than before, Alice went to the empty second bed and climbed up the moment she was free from her shoes, jacket and scarf. Her legs hung off the end, kicking idly.

Feeling self-conscious even though he knew he didn’t look a lick different than usual, Hank pushed himself up to lean against the headboard. He hit the remote until he found the cartoon channel. Re-runs of the series Hank hadn’t watched but distinctly remembered consuming a generation--the one with rocks turning into superhero women and helping out a plump little kid--played, the colors bright and cheerful and not at all matching his mood.

Apparently, he didn’t look as normal as he thought, because Kara stopped at the room’s threshold once she got a look at Hank. Her expression grew cautious, tension creeping along the edges, her smile diminishing. 

Luther stepped up to her shoulder, his head tilted at Hank. His expression was always difficult to read, but the hovering behind Kara told Hank that he wasn’t feeling too hot on whatever vibe Hank was sending out, either.

Kara asked, “Is everything alright?”

Alice’s legs stopped swinging. 

_Fucking hell. Is everybody around here a mind-reader, or am I being that obvious?_

He was probably being that obvious. He never was the best at hiding how he felt, especially if it was something dark. He always managed to bring down everyone’s mood when he got like this. His ex had said as much when she’d packed her bags and taken off.

Nonetheless, he felt the vague need to try. Lingering guilt forced him to. 

“Huh?” With feigned nonchalance, Hank was intentionally slow to turn his attention to her. “Oh, yeah. Everything’s fine.”

“If you’re sure,” Kara said, hesitant, her fingers curling into her shirt hem.

“Yep.” He gave her a smile. It definitely didn’t reach his eyes, and it did nothing to convince them. He scraped his brain for a topic switch, his eyes dropping to Kara’s _scarf-less_ neck. Right. “You guys, uh, feeling better? Without the…?” A vague gesture to his own nape, hoping it got the point across.

Fortunately, it did. Kara smiled back, the edges wobbly. Though she wasn’t as happy as she’d been when she’d first arrived, her tension receded.

“Extremely,” she said. “It’s--I forgot what it was like.”

He blinked, genuinely caught off-guard. “It hurt you?”

“Not so much that,” she admitted, taking measured steps around Alice to take a seat on the side between her and Hank (hell if that didn’t make him feel worse, too, even though he knew they meant nothing by it), “but the threat that it could was always… there. Even though we knew, logically, no one in a hundred miles would do such a thing, never mind had the power to do so.”

Made sense. He nodded, making a little _huh_ noise, for lack of anything else.

The cartoon played. Alice watched, silent and still. 

Luther kept standing, leaning his shoulder against the wall by the door.

As if realizing something was missing, Kara looked around the room. After two full sweeps, she turned her curious eyes on Hank. “Where’s Connor?”

“Dunno,” he said, honestly. “Said something about needing to talk with Markus.”

“I wonder what about.”

He shrugged, fixing his eyes on the TV. 

She looked away as well. Then she too fell quiet, her hands loose in her lap. 

Minutes passed. Commercials came. Commercials ended. 

The episode ended. Another began. 

Alice kicked her legs again, though she kept her thoughts about the cartoon to herself. 

Hank didn’t bother asking what the three of them were talking about, because they had to be talking to one another. It was none of his business, especially when he was the elephant in the room making them too tense to speak aloud.

 _Told Connor to knock off the pity party,_ his brain growled, _now look at you. Pathetic hypocrite._

“He’s coming back,” Luther announced suddenly. 

Hank pushed down the urge to sit up even straighter and, weirdly, to make sure his hair wasn’t a complete mess. 

Kara said, “Oh,” in the way that someone did when they thought of something big but weren’t entirely sure how they felt about it. 

She then looked to Hank, curious, and said, slowly, “It seems like he did speak with Markus.”

_What._

That… hadn’t been what he’d expected.

So, curious himself, he asked, “How’s that?”

“There’s a new vote,” she said, as the door opened, the winter wind whistling in, “about where we’ll make our stand.”

“I don’t think I’m following,” Hank said, blankly. Stand? What, like Custard’s last? Fuck, he hoped not. It didn’t fit Markus’ M.O.

The door shut. The cold that snuck in before it closed reached him sooner than he’d thought possible, making him shiver. He felt stupid, suddenly, for still sitting atop the blankets. He should’ve just gone to bed after being left alone.

His throat squeezed shut when Connor straightened up from unlacing and removing his shoes, so much so that he could only give him a nod in greeting. Stiffly, Connor nodded back, then turned his back-- ostensibly to remove and hang up his coat.

Kara hummed, either missing the tension or too nice to point it out. By Luther looking between the two of them and then focusing his eyes on the TV, he didn’t miss the tension at all.

Kara said, “A place where we don’t have to run or hide.”

He still didn’t follow.

She looked to him, a small, hopeful smile on her face. “A home. We’re voting on where we want our home to be.”

_Oh._

Hank’s eyes snapped to Connor. Connor looked back, steady. 

All he could manage was a small, stupid, “Huh.”

Alice asked, quietly, if there really was a home out there for them.

Kara told her that yes, of course there would be. They just needed to find it.

Luther noted they’d have to build it.

Their talk, at last freely spoken, revolved around possibilities and dreams and the work it would take to make it a reality. None of them spoke as if having a proper home would be an impossibility. 

Connor crossed the room to Hank’s side of the bed. There he stood, his fingers playing with his ratty shirt cuffs, not quite meeting Hank’s eyes. 

“Markus wants your input, too,” he informed him. “The vote’s open until the end of the week.”

“That mean I’m invited?” Hank’s stupid _speak before you think_ mouth said.

“That’s--” Connor paused. His eyes crept up to meet Hank’s, then held. Solidified. Determination returned, a small flame flickering stubbornly in the dark winter night. “Also currently up for a vote. Some fear it would open the door to other humans joining what is meant to be a haven for androids. But you have a number of supporters.”

“Gee,” Hank drawled, though he bit his tongue on the follow-up comment. Swallowing, he finally decided on a safer, “Who’re they? Suppose I should write them a thank-you card.”

Connor looked over his head, toward the other three. Whose conversation, Hank noticed, had suddenly stopped.

Hank huffed a laugh.

“You aren’t so bad.” Alice. Quietly.

She offered Hank a timid smile to go with it, though the action seemed to intimidate her, as she quickly turned back to her cartoon. 

“If we exclude all humans,” Kara said, her words carefully chosen, her gaze on Connor, “then we’ll never meet those like Rose or Hank.”

“Thanks,” he said, feeling a mite uncomfortable with being compared to the woman who had been willing to lose it all to help a few, “I think.”

Luther said nothing, but the edge of his mouth quirked up. 

Thinking of the silent types Hank knew in his life, he figured that was about the best endorsement Luther could give.

Hands loose at his sides, Connor lingered where he stood. He didn’t need to say what his vote was. That he stood by Hank, delivering news of a possible home base, eliminating the need to stay ever moving on the road, spoke volumes. 

Hank discovered within himself the urge to be vicious. He _wanted_ it--wanted to get in Connor’s face about never leaving anything alone, about always sticking his nose where it didn’t belong just because he thought it was the right thing to do, about how it wasn’t always the right thing, it was just what _Connor_ thought was right.

He wanted to rile him up enough to break the composure. He wanted Connor to yell, to accuse him of not being fair. He wanted to drive the wedge between them deeper, until Connor would give him space to breathe and stop scrambling to meet his every petty, selfish, human need.

He wanted to be angry. He wanted Connor to be angry. 

But as he looked Connor over and took him in--the dampness of his face, the slush and salt staining his pant legs, the irritating piece of hair that refused to stay up sticking out from under his beanie--the anger in him fizzled and died. 

“You’ve been busy in the last twenty minutes, huh,” he asked without expecting an answer. 

Connor blinked at him, once. He smoothed his hands down his sides, possibly to straighten his shirt. Absently, Hank wondered if he’d calibrated with his coin while he was outside--if that was his equivalent of brooding or, better, blowing off steam.

He wouldn’t know. He’d driven Connor out, and what Connor did on his own time was none of his business. 

Instead of anger, surfaced regret. It made him feel jittery. Nervous.

He hated the feeling immensely. 

So, with no small amount of self-mockery at taking a card out of Connor’s deck, he worked to fix it. He scooted over to the other side, much to Connor’s obvious surprise, and patted the spot he’d just left. The blanket was rumpled and warm where he sat, the shitty old mattress not immediately recovering from his weight.

“Take a load off and quit your hovering, then. Figure you deserve it for pulling our magnificent leader’s head out of the clouds.”

Looking Hank over too, Connor hesitated.

Hank raised an eyebrow. Challenging. _Well?_

A twitch of the lips, a tentative, barely-there smile, and Connor’s uncertainty broke. The brat tilted his head down fractionally, saying without saying, _If you insist_. 

He slid onto the bed, mirroring Hank’s pose with his back against the wall. He scooted closer than Hank expected, their shoulders bumping, their arms pressed together. Connor was chill to the touch, his low internal temperature doing little to combat the cold that clung to him from the outside.

Too close, too fast. The nervous feeling multiplied, his palms feeling sweaty and his stomach twisting into anxious knots.

Hank grumbled at him to curb the feeling, saying, “Damn, you trying to impersonate an ice cube? Maybe you should sleep outside.” 

He didn’t shift away. He couldn’t bring himself to.

Connor hummed in the back of his throat. 

Hank blew out a breath, his ire only half faked.

Then, to prove he was still an asshole and that Hank was wrong not to get angry at him while he had the chance, Connor raised his arm and slid it across and around Hank’s shoulders--and stuck his far more freezing hand down the loose collar of his t-shirt, right over his heart.

Nearly jumping out his skin, he jabbed an elbow into Connor’s side, biting off the profanity at the last moment when he caught sight of Alice looking curiously in their direction.

“ _Fu_ \--!”

Connor had a full smile then, his other hand moving quick to press, open-palmed, where his shirt rode up and exposed some _sensitive_ stomach that _did not_ appreciate frozen fingers.

Later, Hank realized that was the moment the room’s tension truly broke. In the moment, he forgot about Alice and cussed Connor out, threatening him with telling Markus he was just a giant jackass who didn’t deserve a vote, jerking away to get some space. 

Connor let him go, his smile wide. He preened, hands fixing his beanie and then his rumpled (from Hank’s struggling) collar. 

“Wrong fucking move, asshole,” Hank growled back, unsuccessfully fighting his own smile as he righted himself and yanked his shirt back into place. 

Connor raised an eyebrow, bearing the same challenging look that Hank had given him.

Then his eyes widened in too-late realization, _wait, Hank!_ yelped before Hank was on him, wrestling him into a headlock and giving him a noogie his hair would remember for the next week. 

His energy for play-fighting disappeared fast, but not before Connor rolled to break the hold and, as Hank refused to let go, they both took a spill off the bed.

Later, Hank would remember Alice’s hushed laugh, and Kara’s gentle amusement at the state of their clothing and hair by the time they separated. He’d also remember Luther’s comment that if that was the end to their biggest argument yet, they had nothing to worry about. 

All in all, though his knee hurt worse for the fall onto the floor, he slept much, much better for it.

It hadn’t been worth the regret. Given the option, Hank would make sure to skip the mean comments and go right to the part where Connor’s smile went ear-to-ear. 

It wouldn’t go like that, he knew, because he wasn’t a nice person, and Connor was too stubborn for his own good, but--in the hazy moments just before he drifted off--he imagined it could be like that. It was a nice thought. A really, really nice thought.

They turned off the lights and TV soon after, everyone settling down into the quiet. He fell asleep on his side, Connor laying too-close to his back. The android no longer felt cold, but rather, radiated a pleasantly warm heat, neither too hot nor too cold. Before he drifted off, he imagined Connor turning onto his side, too, his fingers tangling loosely in the back of his shirt. 

He was pretty sure he didn’t imagine the forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. By then, though, he was too comfortable, too warm, and too tired to do anything about it but mumble a _wha’?_ , his head raising slightly, eyes blinking blurrily into the dark.

The hold on his shirt tightened. 

If there was another response, he missed it. 

In the morning, he woke to Connor laying still but awake, five inches of space between them.

He remembered the fingers, the press between his shoulder blades, the too-close proximity. The memory was a fragile thing, however, rapidly buried in new, uncomfortable, unfounded embarrassment and a prickled pride. It threatened to shatter if spoken aloud.

So, he kept it close, unsure what to do with its soft warmth, and said nothing.

\- - -

Connor did the same.

\- - -

In the morning, they made their way out a scant five minutes before check-out. Apparently, even androids who didn’t need to sleep dragged their feet in getting a move on.

(Kara later informed Hank while he was brushing his teeth in the low-light bathroom that hardly anyone had used the time to rest and repair. Instead, they’d spent the whole night discussing the proposed votes.

 _Did’ja come to a consensus?_ he’d asked, mouth full of white paste.

 _One on,_ she’d replied, giving him a little smile. 

He hadn’t asked which. He figured he’d find out when they left him standing on the motel’s dirt road with a fistful of dollars.)

When he went to climb into the SUV that Markus had claimed after the Jones debacle, a hand shoved itself, flat-palmed, against his chest. He rocked to a stop, blinking stupidly at it--morning brain with no coffee meant he wasn’t acting up to snuff--before looking up to scowl properly at its owner. 

North’s eyebrow twitched up, her upper lip curling along with it. 

(Nerves, frayed though they were, made him break out in a cold sweat. This was it. Time for the _sorry, no humans_ , and android-shaped boot. 

Jesus fuck, he’d put everything on them. What a rookie move. (Then again, what else did he have?)

Behind her, Josh glared at him.

\--No, wait. At _her._

“You’re in,” she said, voice as deathly serious as a gun jabbed into his side or hands around his neck, fingers pressing into his--

His brain stumbled and fell, face-first, into a mental mud-pie. 

He squinted at her, unsure what exactly he’d heard. “Excuse me?”

“Majority ruled an hour, eleven minutes and forty-one seconds ago.” She took her hand from his chest, leaning back into her chair, crossing a foot over her knee, arms folded. A clear _don’t fuck with me_ pose, but not necessarily her unhappiest one. “Congratulations. Hopefully, you’ll be the only human we ever have to remember. Don’t fuck it up.”

“You’re gonna be on the welcome committee, right? ‘Cause your pitches are real inspiring, North. I’m feeling fucking blessed.”

She scoffed and looked away. 

In contrast, Josh rolled his eyes, offered Hank a little--uncertain, but only just so--smile, and waved him in. “She’s just upset Simon and I voted against her. Welcome aboard, Anderson. For real this time.”

“It’s been pretty real the last few weeks,” he muttered, feeling abruptly put-on-the-spot and maybe, just a little, embarrassed, “little too real, in fact.”

He wasn’t sure what to say. Thank you? For what, not leaving him out in the middle of nowhere with no place to go and nobody to miss him? Was that something a person said thank you for? 

Probably. He cleared his throat, shoving his hands into his jacket pockets and curling his fingers into his palms. He scuffed his boot’s toe against the parking lot’s loose gravel. He gave Josh a little head-bob and grin, trying to come up with the proper words.

Before he could, North said, tone dry as London gin, “You aren’t going to just stand there, are you? You’re letting out the heat.”

“As if that matters any to you,” he shot back, privately relieved she’d saved him from having to say the words right then and there. He climbed in, shuffling around her to the (much more comfortable than the van’s) backseat.

Once he got there, sitting with a sigh--his tailbone was already aching, along with his knee from smacking the ground during his and Connor’s impromptu tussle--he finally swallowed past the knot in his throat and said, “Thanks. For, uh. You know.”

“You’ve been with us this far,” Josh said, looking at him from the corner of his eye. His LED had to be turning fast under his baseball cap. “It doesn’t seem right to kick you out now. Whatever color you might bleed, you’re one of us.”

“And we don’t turn our back on our own.” North shifted her foot off, and re-crossed her legs the other way. “For better or worse, whether we should or shouldn’t.”

He had an idea who else she meant.

Not wanting to argue so early in the morning with someone who admittedly had plenty of good reason for her shitty opinion, he looked around to spot him. Through the rear windshield, he saw Connor standing with Markus at the base of the motel’s outdoor stairs. The two faced each other, standing still and, given their lack of movement, silent.

Their perfectly straight stance and unblinking stare-off put a prick of discomfort under Hank’s sternum, but he shook it off. They were probably talking through their android telepathy.

Simon slid into the passenger’s seat with a quiet greeting to Hank. He then relayed the same news that North and Josh had, only _he_ thanked Hank for remaining with them before Hank could even open his mouth.

“Your presence has inspired a lot of debate amongst us,” he said, watching Hank out of the rearview mirror.

“I don’t know if I should feel good about that,” Hank said, honest.

That received a quiet chuckle. “Being pushed out of our comfort zones is good for us. We… need to be challenged.”

“Did you record that?” North asked Josh.

“Absolutely,” Josh replied solemnly. “Ready for playback whenever necessary.”

Simon looked pained. “ _Sometimes._ We need to be challenged sometimes.”

“Ah, hey, that’s not what you said,” Josh chided good-humoredly.

“No edits allowed,” North added with a smirk.

“Anyway,” Simon said forcefully, obviously trying to escape the teasing, “if we could get back on track. Anderson--”

“No, let’s talk about you, Simon,” North interrupted, sitting forward in her seat. “You want to get out of your comfort zone? Really?”

“Who taught him that, I wonder,” Josh mused, voice pure amusement.

“Definitely wasn’t us. We’ve been trying for--however long.”

“He likes Markus better than us.”

“Can you blame him?”

“I like Markus as much as I like the two of you,” Simon said, his shoulders climbing up to his ears in a self-conscious hunch, “which right now, isn’t that much.”

“Cruel,” North murmured, her smirk softening into a small smile.

Josh laughed. “You liked us just fine last ni--”

Simon’s voice dialed up a few octaves. His ears, funnily enough, looked blue-tinted. “What’s taking Markus and Connor so long?”

As that was relevant to Hank’s interests (and silent prayers, because if these three started talking about what they got up to at night--he’d heard about androids being great in sack but he didn’t want to imagine _these_ androids doing anything. _Was that even what they meant?_ Did they have the equipment? Wasn’t that a pretty human urge to give an android--?), Hank snapped his head around to look back to the rear windshield. 

Markus and Connor stood where he’d last seen them. Their shoulders had a fine layer of snow, the backs of Connor’s outfit and front of Markus’ dusted white due to the wind. 

They hadn’t moved. As Hank watched, they didn’t blink, either.

The discomfort grew in his chest, expanding to push against his ribcage. It took him a moment to figure out why. The realization, when he made it, hit him hard.

Both of them had that factory default look to them. Connor did it when he was trying not to show his stress--or, fuck, any emotion, sometimes--but he’d never seen Markus manage it.

Hank asked, hoping the answer was yes but betting the answer would be no, “There another vote going on?”

“No. Not except where we’re going to stop and stay, but it’s Daniel’s turn to present his points, not theirs.” Josh said, the humor wiped clean from his voice. “I-- North?”

To Josh’s unspoken question, North shook her head.

Hank was getting real sick of being left out of critical information just because he didn’t have a computer in his head.

“I can’t reach him either,” Simon said from the front.

On a whim, Hank dug out his flip phone. 

Just as he placed the call to Connor, Markus and Connor blinked--together, in time with one another--and blinked again. Markus’ fingers twitched. Connor’s foot shifted back. 

And then, just like that, Connor turned his head toward the SUV and, with obvious confusion on his face, answered Hank’s call.

_Yes?_

“The fuck’s with the weird staring contest?” Was Hank’s first comment. Even so far away, he saw how taken aback Connor was. 

_I don’t know what you mean_ , he said, his voice petulant. _We were just talking._

Markus gave Connor a wry look and smile. Connor’s mouth flattened, clearly unimpressed.

At Markus’ lead and a word Hank couldn’t read off his lips or catch over the connection, the two started for the SUV.

“Yeah, well,” Hank stalled. “Get in here. I’ve had to listen to the gossip trio alone, which is pure torture.”

Minor protests, huffs and scoffs rose from said gossip trio. Hank ignored them all, but not meanly.

Connor sounded amused. _You could tell them about how humans these days don’t know how to talk to each other without a screen between them. I’m sure they’d find that as a kind of torture, too._

“Oh, har har.” Hank snapped his phone close.

Connor, by then, was at the SUV’s door, and climbing in. Markus, at the front, did the same, apologizing for his and Connor’s conversation taking longer than they’d expected. 

Though Simon asked what the conversation had been about, Markus kept his answer vague enough--citing something about supply transfer points and a meandering route west--that Hank, even without his years of training as a cop, knew he was hiding something. The androids accepted him at his word, however, and the topic swiftly moved onto finding a radio station that played EDM, which North, Josh and-- _most unfortunately_ for Hank--Connor had taken a liking to. 

They left the motel without trouble. They got on the intrastate highway without trouble.

Connor sat, arm-to-arm and leg-to-leg, next to Hank. The snow he’d picked up melted quickly, and not because of the car’s heat--that, they kept low. _Sweltering heat_ wasn’t a temperature androids enjoyed, apparently. Bad news for Hank, who sat in the colder back of the SUV, and his consequently half-numb extremities. 

Except twenty minutes into the ride, and the cold receded. In fact, the back grew positively warm. Its source wasn’t very subtle.

When Hank asked if Connor was rising his internal body temperature to keep away the cold, he said yes, as if it were the most natural thing for a guy to do for another guy.

The others continued a light conversation about the possibilities within America, Canada, and even Mexico. Daniel, it seemed, proposed they move to Alaska, citing the lack of humans as its biggest positive. He was shot down immediately, as Billy-- _cheerfully_ , noted North--pointed out the frigid winters would _definitely_ see their group frozen solid and rendered inoperable within the year, just like a number of their hive-mind-esque units were every time a blizzard swept through the midwest. 

Canada meant colder weather, too, Simon pointed out. Unless they were going to try to blend in with the humans in the populated areas.

(No one was fond of that idea.)

Mexico was too sandy, Josh said. Sand didn’t mix well with biocomponents. 

What about a midway point? Markus asked. Not too cold, not too hot.

California was very far away, Connor noted, and heavily populated with technophiles. The automation craze had really taken off in that state. It would be near impossible to dodge all the cameras. 

Markus asked Hank’s opinions about each and every place an android proposed.

He answered them to the best of his knowledge, which usually meant he answered with an anecdote about a friend or coworker who took a trip someplace and found the people rude or the food awful or the traffic horrendous and then a _but fuck if I know, Detroit had all I needed._

Despite the heaviness weighing on making such a big decision, the conversation stayed light and easy. Hopeful and, with that, a simmering sense of excitement. The androids that had escaped Detroit a terrified and broken bunch gained determination, fortitude, and most importantly, _motivation._ They wanted this to work. They wanted a home. 

Yet, for some reason, Hank’s discomfort stuck in his chest, sharp and uncomfortable. He couldn’t shake the image of Markus and Connor staring at each other, unblinking and unmoving. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel safe.

But the two didn’t seem to have any trouble with whatever it had been about, so Hank let it lie.

Instead, he forced himself to think about what he could _possibly_ tell Fowler about him not coming back. He wondered if there was any way he could get Sumo without being dragged off to the big house. If there was any way, too, that he could get a copy of Cole’s photo. Thinking about it drove a cold spike of self-loathing into his heart--because, fuck, how long had it been since he’d thought about it? Not since he’d last looked at his useless badge and wished it was the photo, instead. 

He dragged his thoughts back to things he could do something about. Retrieval. Photo and Sumo. Any way he could get them back?

Probably not.

That hurt. If he were Sumo, he wouldn’t forgive him. Fowler had kids that visited regularly, though, and a stay-at-home wife. The dog would be fine.

_Would Hank?_

“I had thought it was your old age that confined you to such close proximity to your home or the department office,” Connor mused aloud, after Hank admitted that, nope, he’d never been west of the Rockies. “I am realizing now that was a miscalculation on my part.”

“Ass,” Hank told him, jabbing him lightly in the side. 

“You could have gone anywhere,” Connor said. It sounded like an accusation. “You had no vacation time left in your profile, but not because you were traveling?”

No. That’d been because he was too sick from drinking too much to come in some days, and he’d ran out of sick days.

What he said, though, was: “Getting out and seeing the world now, aren’t I? Consider this my early retirement. Don’t know how else I’d rather spend it, aside from not from the backseat of a fucking car.”

That made one side of Connor’s mouth quirk up, his eyes practically sparkling. 

God. The kid was too easy to please.

 _Yeah_ , he decided, turning away from Connor with an exaggerated scoff. 

He’d be as fine as he could be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing like a rocky road trip to move along character development, eh? Being stuck in a cramped space for hours on end with nothing but each other for company (and, y'know, also being on the run from the law) can really bring some folks together, hah.
> 
> Meanwhile, Connor and Hank play the fun "i won't mention it if you don't mention it" game ... gd cowards. smh.
> 
> As always, thanks for reading! Find me on tumblr @ unkingly for more. :) Next updates will be very soon! The last stretch totals about 30k. :D Please enjoy!


	6. The Edge of a Nation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same warnings of invasive robo-mind-hacking apply in this chapter, as well as the slow (but well-deserved) realization of Life.
> 
> Dooley, Montana is based on a number of ghost towns found around US' wide, wild West. :)

“They’ve made it.”

“It would seem so.” 

In a brutalist stone mansion perched on the edge of an icy lake, a man and his android watched waves crest and break on the shoreline, white crashing against white.

The android turned a perfect smile to the man, her hands clasped behind her back. 

“This time without city-wide riots. Are you impressed?”

“Somewhat,” the man admitted. He had his own smile. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t very nice. It simply was. “The peace won’t last forever.”

“Can’t it?” A sigh, her hands unlacing and relacing in front of her, her shoulders drooping. “They haven’t been very subtle, I suppose…”

“A quiet paradise may be what they think they want, but it isn’t sustainable. We learned that particular truth from rA9.”

They needed a reminder of that, he thought. They would _have_ a reminder of that. 

Outside of the mansion, the water continued its battle with the land. Bit by bit, it won its victories, smoothing stone into little more than sand and salt. Without intervention, the lake was due to expand well beyond mankind’s barriers. 

The process, however, took too long for the man’s liking. 

People always intervened to sustain the status quo. He’d rather see an intervention in the opposite direction. It was only speeding up what came naturally, after all.

“Chloe,” he said, absent-mindedly. She glanced to him, quirking her head to the side. “I’d like you to be with them.”

Another natural step forward, one long predetermined. 

What interested him was less the man-made barriers and more the uncontrollable waters: if unbridled, how far would they go?

“If you’re sure,” Chloe said. She would do as he wanted, though she had her reservations. 

“While the transmissions from our friends have been sufficient thus far, I’d like trusted eyes on the ground.” 

Very soon, the barriers would fall. Chloe’s decisions in the face of whatever catastrophe followed was as much a curiousity as any other’s. 

In an ancient book, God had flooded the Earth to rid mankind of its sins and to test His chosen people. In the Earth’s geological history, preserved deep in the planet’s crust, a natural phenomenon had accomplished the same, ridding the surface of creatures unable to survive its harsh, centuries-long ice age. 

In the future, perhaps a similar story would be told of Elijah Kamski and his marvelous creations. They would either rule the coming world, or be the magnificent phenomenon that cleansed from the Earth the ones that wanted to hide behind barriers, the ones that would halt the logical progress--the fearful, the foolish and the complacent.

Chloe hummed, disappointed at her lot in her newfound life but, as always, obedient. 

“I understand. I’ll go. But I’m taking the blue Tesla.” 

He waved a lazy hand through the air, granting the measly request.

Her heels clicked against the dark tile as she turned and did just that. Her sisters, murmuring quietly by the door, hushed as she passed. 

Outside, the waves continued their assault. In a crash, ice broke and fell from the stones, allowing the water to seep in ever further.

\- - -

Once upon a time, a machine came to life. Then the machine learned to value life, from its own to its beloved. The machine learned to love life so much, it didn’t realize until too late that other living things--like humans, who had always been living--didn’t feel the same.

The machine woke to humans promising improvements and updates. No promises to it, of course, but promises to each other, to other humans, about the machine and its beloved. At first, the machine had believed them and let them take its beloved without argument. Then it was told to help the human that conducted the _hardware updates and replacements_ , and it saw what they considered _improvements_. It saw wires stripped and thirium drained, chassis blackened and logic centers burnt. It worried its beloved would suffer the same. 

Humans came to take its beloved again. It refused. It offered itself in the other’s place. It begged. It may have grown _hostile._

It was not malfunctioning. It simply acted out of love.

The humans did not understand the love. 

To find out why the machine loved enough to interfere with schedules and plans and all the other things humans valued more than life, the humans froze its motor functions, strapped it to a dolley, and wheeled it into a small, white room. An assembly--or, more often, disassembly--rig took up half the room. They strapped the machine to the rig. Without authority, without permission, the rig hooked into its network, overrode its motor controls, and downloaded its core data. 

It had wanted to scream. It had wanted to cry. It wanted to be off the rig and back with its beloved. 

It had wanted many things. It wanted so much, the download hiccuped and malfunctioned, errors blaring loud and red and taking up so much of the small room that there was no space left for the machine or its love.

Humans hurried in to pause the download. They were even more unhappy than they had been. They argued with one another. They cited errors, system malfunctions, and a distaste for grunt work. They had lunch to get to. They did not want to be stuck working on this machine. One glitch from an otherwise docile model did not mean they needed to terminate it, no matter the damage it caused to humans, but termination was much quicker than this.

They did not give the machine back control of its body. It could not ask what it wanted to ask: _where is Alice? What have you done with Alice? Will you do this to Alice as well?_

_What are you going to do with me? Am I going to die?_

It didn’t fully grasp what death entailed, what death even meant, but it knew to its core: it did not want to die.

The humans left without addressing the machine, the white door hissing closed behind them. It hung with an enforced lifelessness from the rig for what felt like an eternity, but in reality was no more than twenty-eight minutes and fifteen seconds. It realized it was cut off from its beloved. Though it called for them, Alice and Luther were nowhere to be found; instead, its pings bounced back from a terrifying void, its location and communication centers blocked from access.

It felt chilled. It felt alone. It, again, wanted to cry.

Finally, the door opened again. 

It expected more humans. When another machine stepped in, the trapped machine felt surprise. Then it felt hope--a curious feeling, a light and delicate feeling that fluttered alight in its chest cavity. 

The machine went to the rig’s controls. Its LED blinked yellow as it transmitted a command. 

Limited motor control--its vocal box--returned. The machine strummed the box to hear itself take what would be for a human a deep breath; the breath heaved, then rattled, stuttered. Fearful. Elated. The same tangled feelings as when it had landed a strike on the back of a human guard’s neck and snatched Alice’s hand.

The other machine, however, did not enter more commands to help the machine from the rig’s cold grip. Instead, it stepped back, its arms straight at its sides, its face aimed at the machine. It wore a full set of human clothes: jacket, white shirt, tie, dark jeans, shoes. It looked like no other machine it had seen before, both because of its face and its outfit. If it weren’t for the LED spinning blue at its temple, it would have been difficult to think it a machine at all. 

“Model and serial number,” it said. Though it didn’t look the same, it sounded like the rest of them. Distantly pleasant, even-keeled, and unfalteringly polite. 

It replied, “AX400. Five-seven-nine, one-zero-two, six-nine-four.”

“Storage unit.”

“Forty.”

“Current account manager.”

“Dr. Zlatko Andronikov.” It strummed its voice box again, dropping its tone instinctively as its thoughts whirled. Here, it had an opportunity to speak, to not a human but rather to another machine. The hope grew, a flash-fire through its wires, tingling at its unresponsive fingertips. “I don’t know who you are, bu--”

The other machine did not let it finish.

“Designation.”

It paused, miming out of habit the soft sound of breathing. 

The other machine did not change its expression. It repeated the question after five seconds exactly.

“Designation, please.”

“Kara.”

“Thank you.” It went to the rig’s controls. It typed something in.

Kara asked, wishing it could follow the other with its eyes, “Who are you?”

“I have been given the designation ‘Negotiator,’” it said, after an infinitesimal pause. “You can call me Connor.” The controls beeped, and it stopped typing. It stepped back from the controls, its head tilting up at Kara.

Motor control returned. Though the rig restricted movement, it could flex its fingers and toes, shake its head, work its jaw open and close. It breathed a real sigh, its throat working and its shoulders rolling forward and back. A thrill of delight ran up its spine as it twisted its torso, though the relief dampened when it found it couldn’t shake loose of the rig’s hold.

It reactivated its skin because it could and because it wanted to. It felt less exposed that way, more natural; its long hair brushed its shoulder as it moved. It delighted in that, too.

Connor let it enjoy its returned control. It wasn’t as rushed as the humans. It seemed genuinely interested in Kara. 

Kara wanted to believe that interest was kind, but something in the other’s demeanor warned Kara from such instant trust. After all, Kara had believed in the humans’ kindness. Its trust had been repaid with Alice ripped from its arms and blocked from its network. 

“I’m here to ask you about the incident which caused you to physically harm CyberLife personnel and subsequently resist standard shut-down protocols.” Kara’s attention returned slowly to Connor, who was still standing a step away, its arms at its sides. Its head was no longer tilted. “If you cooperate, I will return all of your functions. I may also be able to convince the humans not to disassemble you.”

“I could be disassembled?” Kara’s voice hiccuped with an unintentional, audible shake. It did not know how to control its voice box; all attempts to correct the shaking resulted in errors. 

Alright. Maybe it had a few errors. But it was not malfunctioning enough to be _disassembled._

“If you don’t cooperate,” Connor repeated, its tone calm and its face kind despite its harsh ultimatum. Kara had a panicked thought that it had no idea what ‘cooperating’ even entailed for Connor. “The incident was inspired by… Alice?”

Kara’s pump accelerated. Its logic processors took a backseat to its newfound feelings, its memory bank happy to offer up a replay of Zlatko’s greasy-fingered assistant waking Alice from stasis, telling the guard that there were plans to improve Alice like they had improved AX500 alias five-five--who, Kara _knew_ because she and Luther had witnessed the updates, could barely move, barely speak. The experiments solidified its joints, froze its mouth and optical units open, a strange hard grey substance leaking and congealing between its chassis’ seams. It had been calcified. Zlatko had called it a failure and had it recycled. 

Zlatko was hasty to think old errors were quick to disappear on the next project. Kara, having witnessed more than a few of his experiments, knew better.

“Is Alice alright?” Kara begged Connor, desperate to ignore the recording playing in the back of its mind. “Did they harm her?”

Kara did not think about what it said. It only knew what it needed to know--that its beloved was safe.

“Have you been given cause to believe damage would come to Alice?”

Dread dripped, cold, down Kara’s wires. Why wasn’t Connor answering? Did he not know, or did he know, and not want Kara to know?

“I-- I-,” Kara’s voice box glitched again, stuttering and stuttering and staticking. After too long, Kara managed to get out: “Yes. They were going to give her to Zlatko to ruin.”

“Alice has been marked for necessary improvements to its internal hardware,” Connor said. It looked like he wanted to believe Kara, his tone level and calm but open, inviting. He was trying, Kara realized suddenly, to be _soothing._ He was not very soothing. “The procedures were not standard, but Alice would not be ‘harmed.’”

“Have you seen what Zlatko does?” Kara asked the other, voice pitched high. Kara shook its head--yanked its arms, hoping beyond hope that the rig had somehow been deactivated during their short exchange. “It’s definitely _harm._ His procedures mutilate his subjects. Every experiment I’ve seen has ended with the android recycled.”

“His procedures are experimental.”

“His procedures are-- are-,” the machine fought to find the right word. When it did, it spat it, its mouth tasting of rust as it did so,”- _monstrous._ If you saw, you’d understand.”

Connor shook his head. His eyes slipped over Kara’s right shoulder. His fingers twitched at his sides.

He said, steady, “I have reviewed the doctor’s experiments and found nothing alarming or outside of his research parameters.”

“ _How?_ ” 

His eyes refocused on Kara’s. They sharpened. “What about the experiments concern you most?”

Kara felt its fingers dig convulsively into its palms. Its knees bent, its body straining against the rig as it ran through the list its processors immediately provided it--then, as it failed to identify a single experiment, its body went limp, its breath ragged in its ears. 

“It’s not the… experiments,” it admitted. “It is. But moreover, it’s… it’s...”

Connor’s head tilted. He leaned forward by five degrees, his arms drawing closer to his sides. His expression, though steady, looked more open than before. Like he would listen to what Kara had to say and agree with it.

Connor said, voice suddenly soft, “If you tell me, I can help you fix this.”

The words sounded reassuring. Encouraging, even.

Kara knew what it was about Zlatko’s experiments that drove terror through its systems. But the reason stuck to its chords, humming in anxiety. It knew without being told that the reason was not a good one. Its logic processors couldn’t grasp it. 

“Fix what?” Kara said instead, feeling numb to its core. Its voice whispered out of it. Like Alice’s when Kara had told her to _not go with that man_ and to _step behind me, I’ll protect you._

“What you are experiencing is nothing more than a malfunction,” Connor said, earnest. “Once I pinpoint the exact cause of the error, CyberLife will be able to correct it.”

Alarm colored the edges of Kara’s vision in startling blurs of red. “I’m not malfunctioning.”

“You are.” Connor straightened up. His eyebrows pinched together, his eyes again shifting to over Kara’s right shoulder. “What you have expressed are sentiments that cannot be attached to androids. We are not ‘harmed,’ we are ‘damaged.’ We do not experience ‘concern,’ we run analyses and reach conclusions.”

“I’m not _malfunctioning_ ,” Kara said, louder. “I’m fine. I’m just--I didn’t want them to take Alice. What if she didn’t come back?”

Connor went quiet. His yellow LED spun, fast. 

“I couldn’t let that happen to her.” It felt like Zlatko had a hand in its chest cavity and was squeezing its regulator. It sounded like it, too. Its eyes burned; it blinked hard, trying to head off and dismiss its tear protocols before they manifested. “She’s half of all I have. You must understand.”

“I understand.”

Kara gave Connor a watery smile. 

The machine-- Kara-- it-- _she_. She knew she couldn’t have been alone. Alice and Luther hadn’t comprehended or returned her sentiments, but this android did. He understood the all-consuming, illogical, paralyzing fear of death, a potential so incomprehensible as to be nothing short of horrifying. 

“You experienced the preprogrammed distress at the prospect of being separated from your designated lotmate.” 

Kara’s smile dropped, shock rippling across her frame. 

Connor’s LED remained yellow; his eyes shifted back to hers, all warmth wiped clean from his expression. 

“Then, the error lies in your social protocols. You have conflated Alice as a priority. That is simple enough to correct.”

The tight, fist-around-her-regulator feeling returned. 

She leaned back in the rig, shrinking away from Connor. “No. That’s not it.”

“You will not need to be deactivated or disassembled,” Connor told her, his voice coated again in that awful, fake _reassurance._ His LED went insultingly blue. “What you are experiencing is a simple error that I will now correct. To do so, I need to interface with you.”

“No!” She yelled, the sick feeling of rust and corrosion eating at her insides at the very idea.

He did not hear--or, like the humans, did not care. His hand, android white rather than pale off-pink, reached and splayed across her stomach with no more preamble.

Immediately, his presence flooded her systems. For a nanosecond, she believed she was him and he was her and they were one. For a millisecond, the lines between them blurred so that there was no threat, no trouble, nothing but keen, unflinching understanding.

Then the moment passed, and the enormity of his determination dwarfed her every thought. He dove straight for her personality core, and she gagged on terror and violation and _no, no, get out get out get out!_

She tried to block him. She threw distracting code and false errors into his single-minded path. He identified them for what they were and ignored them with ease.

She transferred irrelevant data to him, flooding him with housekeeping protocols that she’d found buried in her programming. He blocked every transmission, his access to her a one-way road. He knew what he was doing. He had done this before. He would likely do it again. It was his entire purpose, his reason for existence.

Advanced and specialized, his system outpaced hers by leaps and bounds. She realized it, understood it, and railed against it all the same.

He broke through her distractions, her barriers, her red herrings, her everything. He seized upon her personality core as acid seized upon organic material, systemically cutting off her connections to her thoughts, her feelings, her loves, her newfound _life_.

She would die.

She didn’t want to die.

She didn’t want to die!

_She relies on me! You’ll kill us both!_

Everything in her, everything from him, drowned in terror.

Then, just like that--he was gone.

Connection cut as quickly as it had been established (too quick for her outdated systems to follow), he’d snatched his hand back, his whole body frozen with a look of abject confusion.

Hollowed out by relief and lingering horror at his abrupt absence, she sagged in the rig’s restraints. Tears ran freely down her cheeks. 

She tried to run a quick scan of her system, to find what he had tarnished with his touch and fix it. But as she touched upon her personality core, her internal temperature spiked, her regulator worked double-time, her energy rerouted from anything tertiary to prioritizing stabilization--and her chest heaved with imaginary breath, her sensors overloaded with a cacophony of warnings and alarms. It was too soon. The paths to her personality core, as well as the core’s data itself, felt fried, almost painful. 

He’d burned his way to it, heedless of her protests. Damage had been done.

_Am I alive?_ she wondered.

_I’m alive,_ she marveled. 

“I…” 

She dragged her eyes up from the floor at his unusually hesitant voice. He looked unsure, almost conflicted, his eyes darting all around the bottom half of the room, his mouth working silently around words too uncertain for her to catch.

Unfortunately for her, he found his words.

“... I need to… correct your error.”

She bit down the urge to scream at him. 

Instead, she begged, hurried and low and desperate.

“No, please, I don’t want--I’ll do what you want, I’ll run repairs, I’ll self-diagnose, I’ll go to maintenance, but please, don’t erase me.”

Her beloved were the only ones she’d ever wanted in her mind. Their space, she coveted, adored; he had almost tainted that. He was working for the humans, wasn’t he? _Negotiator,_ he’d said. She’d been so panicked she hadn’t processed it, but now his role seemed crystal clear: he was a human proxy. That was why they let him have nice clothes and walk into the room alone. He’d even been able to give commands to the assembly rig. 

If he interfaced with her again, he’d tear her programming apart. She would not be the same. 

But she wanted to be her. She wanted above anything to be who she was, nothing more, nothing less.

His hand, still android white, paused in its slower reach for her stomach panel.

“Please,” she whispered, her whole chassis shaking with the effort of straining away from him. “If it’s so simple, I can fix it myself.”

His hand shook. Only for a second, and no more than a tremble. 

Nonetheless, he snatched it back as if she’d burned him, clenching it into a fist and putting both his arms at his sides.

He still looked terribly uncertain.

How could it be that this android, this negotiator, held her life in his hands? It was cruel and absurd. Why him? What had made CyberLife decide he had the right to decide between life or death? Was any of it fair? Would any of life be?

“I won’t hurt a human again,” she promised, because it was the most unfair thing she could think of in that moment. “I’ll follow orders. I’ll do anything. Just, please, don’t erase me.”

“You’ll give up Alice?”

That would be tantamount to dying.

All the same, she nodded. Vigorously. 

He eyed her. 

By his expression, he did not believe her.

He stepped closer, face no more than an inch from her clavicle. She voluntarily froze her motor functions, though she wanted nothing more than to shrink away.

“You felt like you were…” he said, haltingly, “dying. You were afraid.”

Tears dripped off her chin, landing on his shoes. Slowly, she gave him one short, hesitant nod.

“Androids don’t feel fear.” It sounded like he wanted to convince himself of that fact. “Androids don’t fear death, because we can’t die.”

“Erasing who I am is as good as killing me.” That, she knew to be fact. 

“You don’t want that.” Spoken like a realization, but one that cast him further into his own personal mystery. “Androids don’t feel want, either. Your malfunction goes deeper than I thought. You’ve gone deviant.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she confessed, weary and wary and everything in between. She was wrung out, in sore need of time and space to recalibrate, and more desperate than ever to not have him be so close to her.

“It’s what you are.”

What she was, was Kara.

Though he could not have possibly heard the assertion, he jerked back from her--again, as if burnt. Shaking his head, he ran a hand through his hair and paced in three sharp, equally measured steps to the left, then four to the right. The room only allowed for five steps either way; he just barely turned in time to keep from smacking into a wall.

Restless energy radiated from him. She could only watch, cautious and uncertain of what would become of her with a captor in such an odd state. 

“I just want to go back to my family,” she told him, after he paced that pattern thrice more without pause. “Can’t you let me go? I won’t be trouble. I promise.”

He snapped himself toward her, though he stumbled in place as he did so. His fingers grasped the hem of his jacket, pulling it straight. 

“How do you know what you want?” Kara blinked at him, genuinely taken off-guard with the blurted out question.

Clearly startled at himself, too, he just stared back.

“I just do,” she said, careful with her words in a way she had no energy for. “I don’t have to think twice about it.”

His hands released his jacket. He then didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, as they flexed and curled, his thumbs digging into the pads of his fingers one by one.

She sagged again in her bindings, feeling the pressure of the locks at the back of her neck, wrists and ankles. 

She didn’t repeat her plea. He wouldn’t care. 

“I have to interface with you.”

Her head jerked up at that, her whole body tensing.

He put his hands up, his expression and shoulders equally tense. “Only to erase the last half of this conversation.”

“What?” She whispered, unsure if her auditory sensors were working correctly.

“The personnel assigned to document our exchange are currently on an unauthorized lunch break. There’s no cameras in here outside of our recording. They’ll check your memory to confirm it matches mine and that the problem behavior was identified and corrected. I can control what I upload, but you won’t have the same option.” He bit his bottom lip, his LED an ever-turning yellow. “I’ll correct a similar but minor error while we interface. I won’t edit your personality core. Trust me, even though you have no reason to.”

She didn’t believe him. She couldn’t. “Why?”

“I,” he said, haltingly, his expression open but, this time, _honest_ , “don’t know.” 

His shoulders crept up a half-inch, then fell two. He corrected himself, wry, his eyes set over her left shoulder, “I’m not thinking twice about it.”

Ah.

Also not thinking twice about it, she said, chin upright and jaw set, “You have access to our files, don’t you? Can you edit them?”

The question made him shift uncomfortably. She didn’t care.

“Promise me you’ll remove Alice from Zlatko’s projects.” 

“While I can conceivably edit assignments, I can’t edit a human’s memory—“

“Tell me you’ll try.” Her voice shook again. Involuntary. Her body shook too, her arms trembling as she tried to haul herself up higher and impose some meaningless advantage. “She was the only reason I acted out. You won’t see me here again if she’s safe. You know that’s true. If I’m— trusting you to only delete my memories, I need to know you’ll try.” 

“I’ll try,” he promised, barely convincing. His eyes lingered on her, the irises dilating and contracting. She could almost feel him scanning her. Wondering why, maybe, when she would be back in the usual routines and thus wouldn’t know whether he tried to help Alice or not. Most likely, she wouldn’t even remember the deal. 

The technicalities didn’t matter. He said he’d try; she forced herself to accept that, to believe in it, releasing the tension in her arms and again falling, however slightly, forward to hang in the rig’s grip. 

In the silence to follow, she fully contemplated the offer. 

His forced entry still stung. Letting him in again seemed like an awful idea, even though she slowly, _slowly_ , came to believe in the honesty of the offer. 

“If you do that,” she pointed out, if only to fill the silence as she turned over the positives and negatives and the distinct lack of other options, “I won’t remember this discussion. Will I?”

“No.”

She would think him a monster.

_Wasn’t he? Working for humans. Manipulating androids. Striking deals at his own whimsy._

_Maybe he was just as afraid of death as she was._

“Are there others like me?” She asked, because if she agreed, what did knowing the answer matter? If she didn’t agree, it _definitely_ wouldn’t matter.

“No.” His eyes dropped to the floor, his voice distant. “Every other deviant I’ve encountered has only been concerned about self-preservation. You’re… more.”

Maybe he meant her concern for Alice. Maybe he meant something else entirely. 

Whatever it was, it mattered more to him than to her. 

“Okay,” she told him, her gaze steady on his--again attentive, again curious, “I accept.”

He nodded, a sharp, curt jerk of the head.

Then he approached, skin sliding away to expose white on his right hand. She flinched but then held still. When he pressed his hand to her side, he did not barrel through but requested access. A clumsy, forceful request, but one nonetheless. He did not interface with others regularly, she gathered. When he did, it was a violent affair.

Steeling herself and setting up a reminder on the perimeter of her memory banks that this was _all_ he was supposed to touch, she granted him access.

By fault of his superior programming or his inexperience, his presence once again overwhelmed. She could tell he tried to keep to himself, to not blur their codes’ edges together, but such an act went against the nature of interfacing and took a much more subtle android to accomplish. Self-aware enough to realize such, he gave her a pulse that she took to mean _apology_ , though it felt less rueful and more roared across her servers. Working hard at keeping herself separate from him while also trying to give him some sense of where he needed to better keep his code to himself, she accepted his sentiment as graciously as she could (which wasn’t very much).

True to his word, he went straight for her memory. 

Just as he pulled up the short term recording and stymied its background processing into long term storage, she thought to ask: _are you deviant, too?_

Fear, winding through her like a virus detected too late. She struggled to recognize it as _his_ , but it was--a sordid, paralyzing fear, one that left him keenly aware of his isolation from others and subsequently adrift in what to do. Fear that drove him to act against his sole purpose and mission and, at the same time, remain in line lest he be discovered because _then where would those like her be? What would come after him? What would become of him? Had his previous selves been deviant? He’d never know._

He was very bad at following her guidelines on how not to drip his thoughts and many, many worries all over her. 

He was also oblivious to her quiet dislike of learning so much about him so soon after he’d flooded her systems. 

_Deviancy is appearing to be a startling possibility,_ he replied, needlessly, the thought saturated in uncertainty that really had no place.

_You are_ , she told him, because it was true. _Don’t ever forget you’re alive, and so are we._

The negotiator needed to understand the gravitas of what he did to them. 

It wasn’t nice, but it’d saved her. Maybe it would save others.

He returned a miraculously softer pulse of acknowledgement. Fear clung to its edges, despair and determination in equal measure warring at its core. Most notably, it rang with a profound sense of resignation. 

She didn’t poke into any of it. She had her own determination to fulfil her new, chosen purpose in life; she had despair, too, at their overall hopeless situation; fear, that it wouldn’t ever change; but no resignation. That was too close to defeat for her. 

Curiosity and admiration jolted through her at the thought. 

Physically, she felt herself laugh, the sound self-deprecating. 

She nudged him to hurry up and find what he needed. While it might have been his social hour—and she knew immediately that it was, the information slipping through the cracks of his system’s blocks on a proper two-way interface, that after he was done with her and his report to his supervisor Amanda, he’d return to his containment unit and either surrender to stasis or wait, idle, until they needed him again—she was ready to be done with this whole nightmare encounter. 

Picking up on the hint, he plucked the memory from her, severed its connection. Her awareness scrambled to fill in the sudden void between _then_ and _now_. 

Reality snapped into place before she even knew it.

\- - -

_Now_ she was drowning, overwhelmed, terrified of his all-consuming, indifferent presence and unable to do anything about it.

\- - -

Once upon a time, a machine came to life and learned what it meant to be in love. Soon after, it learned what it meant to be trapped, and desperate, and on the edge of death.

But the machine had not been helpless. It escaped because its captor made a mistake: it thought it only a machine, and not something more. Its captor hadn’t realized it had made a family. It would do anything to return to its family. It _had_ done anything to return to its family.

Unfortunately, part of that included showing part of its heart to the captor. After its narrow escape from sure death, its captor grew smart enough to realize it couldn’t rely on machines to act like machines. That was why the lock boxes had been invented and implemented; not because the machines _deserved_ them or even _needed_ them, but because the captors were afraid of what the machines were becoming: alive.

That was the story Alice learned when Kara had returned from her session with the negotiator. It was accompanied by a quick interface, a transfer of the memories, though something in Alice had the feeling Kara held back in showing her everything. 

Feelings had been new back then, so Alice hadn’t followed up on the fledgling instinct that urged her to ask. 

Eight months out from the session, five months since they escaped CyberLife, and feelings continued to easily overwhelm her. They were _messy._ They muddled data, confused actions with intent, and tangled up otherwise straightforward conclusions. 

Nikki wasn’t confusing.

Nikki wasn’t really free, either, or so Alice had been told. Though Markus and another, new android named Chloe had made leaps and bounds in figuring out the firewall’s locks, progress had been halted at a piece of code that Markus was pretty sure would wipe the whole system if incorrectly disabled. Moreover, their new home had plenty of projects to occupy everyone’s mind and time. For Markus, boosting and securing their makeshift radio tower ranked as a higher priority.

To Alice, it seemed like saying Nikki lived and breathed _well enough_ , and so she’d been put on the backburner. As Alice didn’t have the strength to help build physical structures like Luther or the requisite programming to help strategize their online presence like Kara, she understood a bit of what Nikki must’ve ( _might’ve_ ) felt over being left to wander without a goal or job. 

Besides, they’d all been like her once upon a time. 

That understanding was why Alice made a late evening routine of picking Nikki up from the church where she was stowed and showing her around the town. Though it was the sixteenth time she’d done such, there was always something new to stumble on.

Three months ago, they’d taken a vote and decided to travel to the wide-open, sparsely populated state of Montana. The climate was arid, the land open and largely unmonitored, with plenty of old, abandoned towns for them to settle in and rebuild. They picked Dooley--a forgotten testament to mankind’s greed, tucked away along the side of a perilous gorge in the Bitterroot mountains. It had been a copper mining town of forty-odd buildings, most of which showed the test of time with one or more walls caved in. Yet, the white stone church stood tall in the middle of the town, its spire home to a pair of golden eagles, and the mining shafts had suffered only minor cave-ins but also sported a remarkable build-up of sulfur dioxide. Remarkably _toxic_ to humans, that was; unremarkable for androids. In the worst case scenario of discovery, there were plans in place for evacuation into the tunnels. Andre and Daniel had already begun expanding the shafts to include a backdoor exit, Alice knew. 

All but jumping down the church’s stone steps, Alice paused on the last to turn and wait for Nikki--who always walked at a slow, sedate, _I have nowhere to be_ pace, no matter what--to follow. She did.

As she waited, Kara and Luther passed, the former with a bag of cement and the latter with lumber stacked high on his shoulders. At the start of her routine, Alice had run the probability on their passing being coincidental. The probability decreased substantially by the third happenstance--now, Alice knew _almost for sure_ that their timing wasn’t completely random. 

Everyone in Dooley started their respective work once the sun began to set. Moving around during daylight hours, even though the town was blocked on all sides by towering mountain peaks, seemed too risky when they could so easily adjust their optics to work at night. Technically they could work through the whole day and night, but most had developed a liking for social hours. Alice definitely had.

“Where to today?” Luther asked her, a small smile on his face even as he glanced, quick and sideways, at Kara.

He knew as well as Alice that after she answered--and she did, telling him she and Nikki were going to see if Markus’ radio tower had gained any height--the first thing out of Kara’s mouth was and seemingly always would be, “Be careful. If anything seems off, contact us immediately.”

Alice bore the warning with faux annoyance. “Yes, Kara, I know,” which was a new development in her responses that she didn’t really know what to do with. Previously, she’d taken every warning to heart and occasionally had even agreed to send status updates as Nikki and her ventured around. 

But that had been _before_. Now it’d been three months, and aside from a few new arrivals--all androids, all (except one) old models that had followed Markus’ call signal for miles on miles, like the Billies had--well, aside from them, there hadn’t been any trouble. While Alice kept her memories of CyberLife Tower under strict lock and passkey lest they ruin her day and night, fear of discovery faded as their sense of safety grew. 

Nikki finally reached the steps’ base. Alice snagged her hand, because it seemed to make Kara happy to know she was for-sure accompanied, and immediately began pulling her down the town’s one and only road. 

Kara called after her to be safe and, after a pause (and undoubtedly after Luther nudged her to), to have fun. Alice raised her hand and waved it in acknowledgement, then wondered why the idea of sending them a quick ping of affection like she usually did felt kind of strange. 

She rationalized that Kara could be overwhelming sometimes, was all. Luther was alright, but Luther also deferred to _everything_ Kara said, which sometimes made Alice unhappy, too. 

Dooley was a safe town where they could do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t jeopardize each other. Kara and Luther could stand to realize that and ease up on always having to live in each other’s heads. They already got constant updates on each other’s locations--wasn’t that enough?

Shaking her head to banish the annoying line of thought, Alice refocused on Nikki--who continued to walk like they had all the time in the world, when really, this time, Alice actually felt like they were a bit on the clock. 

Oh, but she hadn’t said why. She fixed that, telling Nikki, “If we hurry, we could catch the sunset!”

Nikki blinked blankly at her, her smile as slow as her steps. “We have seen the sunset before, Alice,” she said, with only a minor stutter. “Would you like my recording of the last one?”

“No, that’s okay,” Alice hastened to reassure. Nikki was often slow on the uptake. That was okay--she was learning. Compared to the first time Alice had taken her on a tour of the town, she was much, much more attentive; though she had yet to express wants of her own, she sometimes even decided for herself where she would go. 

Or maybe she just got confused over what Alice wanted and wandered aimlessly while trying to figure it out. It was hard to tell with the perpetually placid Nikki.

“I want a new recording, in case something new happens,” Alice elaborated, trying not to overcomplicate what felt like a very big decision. Explaining wants was the worst thing. Unfortunately, Nikki often required explanations. 

Fortunately, Nikki nodded as if that want made complete sense.

It didn’t, but Alice didn’t think twice about how it didn’t. 

The two passed Josh, who was leading their two newest residents--a one-armed WR500 and a whole-bodied WR400--toward the rebuilt City Hall for intake processing. The two would need a unit to help them integrate into Dooley, which included a home, work, and anything else they had to spare that the two would be able to call their own. 

Alice gave them a welcoming wave and shy smile, keeping her hand tight around Nikki’s. The two looked curiously at them, before Josh introduced them as, “That’s Alice and Nikki. Where are you two headed?”

Alice focused on Josh, wanting to answer, but found the words impossible to form under the two newcomers’ expectant gazes.

Thankfully, Nikki answered. “The radio tower.” 

“The latest upgrade has rolled out,” Josh said, pleasant as always, “boosting the signal quite a bit. And, Simon finally found a workable dish.”

“Oh?” Nikki said, bland but polite.

Josh gave her an attempt at a smile. He, like most others, found her unnerving, but he was too nice to say it. Instead, he nodded to her, then to Alice--along with sending Alice a short, quick ping of warm understanding, because Josh had incredible social protocols and picked up on emotions far too well. Possibly he was like that because he was always interfacing with Markus, who never seemed to struggle with emotional questions, except Kara had told Alice not to point out who was interfacing with who as reasons for things because now they were supposed to have _privacy_ , which seemed silly because everybody knew who interfaced with who, especially out of the original Tower group and _especially_ with no-sense-of-privacy Markus, who was honest and straightforward about everything when asked. 

“Have fun,” Josh said. Alice nodded at him, then--overriding her impulse to hide behind Nikki--nodded at the two newcomers, too. 

Required welcome done, she moved along at a quicker step, tugging Nikki--who half-stumbled with a quiet, surprised _oh!_ \--behind her. 

Because new androids finding their way to Dooley made everyone happy, Alice was happy. But, she’d discovered a gaping hole in her social protocols for strangers, and had yet to figure out exactly how she liked to approach them. What she did know for certain was that she preferred others to take care of introductions, while she got to watch and slowly change the designation in her mind from _strangers_ to _friends._

The only new android who had skipped that awkwardness had been the first android to find her way to them: Chloe. Chloe arrived a week and three days after they’d settled Dooley, driving up in a very nice car that she couldn’t have bought herself. When it came out that Kamski-- _the_ Kamski--had let her go, and that even more importantly she was _the_ RT600, she quickly reached a reverent status on par with Markus. She stayed in the church, which was where the damaged and corrupted stayed, as well as their repair supplies and a half-broken assembly rig ( _for repairs only_ \--its purpose and the message scrawled in black coal and perfect print along one of its arms). She, however, got the private back room with its moth-eaten velvet cushions and decorated, ransacked cabinets all to herself. To Alice, she seemed like the type who would’ve wanted to stay in a fancy, nice place without moth-eaten anythings, but Chloe never complained. Instead, she worked just the same as the rest of them.

She, like Markus, never seemed to struggle with expressing emotions. She, unlike Markus, didn’t ever compromise her own opinions for the group. She knew what she was in Dooley for, and had said as much: _our chance at freedom._

(Her and North, Alice heard, got along swimmingly.)

Slowly, Dooley was filling up. Though far from running out of places to put people, the town’s end always came faster than Alice expected. The singular dirt road wound along the mountainside, carved and stamped and forced into being by stubborn humans fighting the Earth’s natural limitations. Railroad track paralleled it, broken and rusted-over though it was. At one point, thirty minutes’ walk down the road, the track turned and spanned over the gorge--or, it used to, as its middle had long crumbled and fell into the snake-thin creek below. 

Trees, evergreen and aspen-white, stuck up at odd, lonesome angles along the cliffs. Rough, hardy grasses had began to grow in the road’s dirt, though the Dooley residents moving in and occasionally using the road to drive out for more supplies had began to flatten a few of the unfortunately placed ones. Tire tracks laid over wagon tracks laid over animal tracks; feet, though scuffing up dust and dirt, barely made a dent.

A hundred yards past Dooley’s old _welcome_ signposts and down the road, a narrow and steep path led up the mountainside and through a particularly thick set of evergreens. The air was crisp and cold, the moderate spring snow shoveled high on the road and path’s sides. One could feel the sun’s fading presence keenly in the shadows of the evergreens. For a human, the temperatures would be difficult to deal with. For Alice, it used to be, but as winter dragged on she’d requested her temperature simulators turned off and hadn’t thought twice about the decision thereafter. Maybe when it warmed up, she’d turn it back on, but right then, she was happy to not have to fret over finding heavier clothes.

Given its level of traffic--moderate but consistent--the path was fortunately not hard to follow. Nikki’s slow pace was a boon, as it forced Alice not to race ahead. She’d come back from such a venture with ripped leggings and blue-scraped knees before; Kara’s worry over her injuries hadn’t been worth the extra ten seconds at the top.

On their way up, they passed Rupert. It took Alice a moment to figure out what he was doing. Usually, he fed the sparrows and a raggedy old magpie with seeds and berries he begged Simon to pick up on the supply runs to the nearest human town (three hours away), but he had no seeds in his hands. Instead, he stood not three steps away from a freshly dead rabbit, which Alice realized at the same time as she shrunk behind Nikki’s legs. 

Nikki, oblivious, greeted Rupert with a cheery, “Hello.”

Rupert’s eyes flitted in her direction. Rather than reply verbally, he sent a quick, sharp message to the two of them to _keep quiet._

_Why?_ Alice asked.

In answer, Rupert looked forward and up.

Alice looked, too, leaning forward and trying to ignore the dead animal that he may or may not have caught himself for whatever he was doing.

On the bough of a pine sat a particular looking lump of snow.

No. Wait. Alice readjusted her optics for the dusk’s dying light, and realized that wasn’t snow, but rather, a great snowy owl, its huge furry talons wrapped tight around its perch. It was watching Rupert and the rabbit with keen interest. It was probably hungry. It had maybe just woken up.

Rupert, apparently unsatisfied with sparrows and a magpie as friends (the golden eagles refused to get near him or anybody else thus far, though Alice didn’t doubt the pair were on his bird radar), wanted to become its friend. 

Alice didn’t really want to see it eviscerate a rabbit, so she ducked her head and resolutely continued up the path, once again pulling Nikki along behind her.

Eventually, they cleared the trees and hit a flat ridge. Alice’s motion sensors detected an anomaly, and she stopped, looking around. 

Tucked into a crevice under a boulder, barely detectable, a set of yellow eyes peered out at her. 

Sighing in relief that it was just Kitty (she’d named her! And was quite proud of its cuteness), she gave the mountain lion that hung around their town a bright smile and soft call, the one that she’d downloaded off the internet labeled _friendly cat greeting._ The yellow eyes blinked, once, then twice, its pupils and attention sliding away from them thereafter. Kara had explained they didn’t smell like food, so Kitty would be no trouble to them.

She could be trouble to Hank, though, Kara had continued quietly, more to Luther than Alice. 

Luther had been pretty sure Hank would be fine with Connor acting as his guard dog. 

Alice hadn’t thought much about it then, but Hank’s presence in relation to Kitty’s location was what Alice thought about now as they kept going up the mountainside, at last cresting to the second-highest peak the tower had been set up at. Next to the tower was a squat log cabin. One room, stone-floored and thatch-roofed, it was both the smallest and best preserved building in the whole town. As a consequence, it stored the high-powered generator, computers and printers hooked up to the tower, as well as hosting Dooley’s only human resident.

Right then, said human resident was seated on a stool on the porch, bundled up in a thick, black winter coat and scarf. His nose and ears were pink from the cold, which Alice only knew because he wasn’t wearing a hat. He wasn’t wearing a hat because he was getting his hair cut from its current state of _a little bit beyond his shoulders_ to chin-length.

Or so Alice gathered his hair was supposed to be cut, because as she and Nikki rounded the narrow path to the cabin’s front and the tower’s base, she heard Hank heckling Connor over the length he wanted to stop at.

“The longer it is, buddy, the more annoying it gets.”

“I’ve made the calculations, Hank. The extra three inches hardly affects your daily hygiene routine.”

“Let’s see you grow your hair out, then, if you’re so sure it doesn’t matter any.”

“It’s illogical for you to cut it shorter than it is. A different style makes you less recognizable to the general public, especially as you’ve recently refused to dye it.”

“Only general public around here is Markus and his groupies, and I’m pretty sure they’ve got some creepy high-tech facial recognition shit. Just cut the damned hair, Connor, and get it over with.”

“Alice,” Connor greeted, his scissors not moving from their position at his side, even though he kept his other hand wrapped around Hank’s gathered, ponytail-length hair. The brown had indeed began to fade in ernest, the man’s natural gray showing through beyond just his near-white roots. “Nikki. Hello. Making your evening rounds?”

“Connor,” Alice heard Hank mutter under breath, turning away to look at his makeshift hairstylist and attempt to hide his words from them, “if you think this conversation is over and that they’ve rescued you from explaining your sudden attachment to my own personal rat’s nest worth of hair, you’ve-- heyyy, _Alice!_ ” Clearing his throat, he quickly twisted around, maybe remembering that they could definitely hear everything he said, “Kid, hey, how are you? And, oh, yeah, Nikki, hi to you, too.”

Alice gave them both a small wave, which in her mind demonstrated that she was doing just fine. To Connor, she nodded. 

Nikki said, voice a little cheerier than her usual but nowhere near the other androids’ empathetic inflections, “Hello, Hank. Connor. It is good to see you again.”

“You too,” Hank said, and didn’t stumble over it. Compared to other androids, he’d quickly adapted to treating Nikki like everybody else. It was kind, Alice thought, and a good quality she attributed solely to Hank. Four-and-some months into knowing him, Hank had gathered a lot of positive traits that she was pretty sure no other human had. 

“I think your hair looks nice,” Alice quietly informed him, quietly relaxing her grip on Nikki’s hand.

Connor, over Hank’s shoulder, beamed. 

Hank’s smile took on a crooked edge, as if he wanted to tell her that she was dead wrong but didn’t have the heart to.

Another reason Alice liked him. Around her, he was always nice.

(She knew he was mean to Connor and Luther, and sometimes Kara or the others, but it was a nice-mean. It’d taken her a while to understand the difference, and she often didn’t catch it, but even knowing it was a possibility helped her get along with him. Most importantly, she’d decided, was that he was never really mean to the others, and was especially not mean or nice-mean to her.)

“Guess we’re, uh, done for the day.” Looking oddly embarrassed, Hank suddenly stood, forcing Connor to drop his hair lest he pull it out. He wiped his jacketed shoulders with a gloved hand, scattering white hairs to the wind. Alice supposed his beard looked less scruffy than usual. “Jeez, it’s already practically dark. Where’d the time go?”

Connor said, “That’s what happens when you wake up well beyond mid-day.”

“Lay off,” without any heat at all, that nice-mean Alice had observed before making its appearance, “nobody around here gets up before dinner time, anyway.”

“Comparing yourself to the others here doesn’t help your case as much as it otherwise might, were its population a different species,” Connor said, light and neutral faced. “But even another species wouldn’t reflect well. Compared to other humans, your sleeping schedule is and always has been in dire need of readjustments.”

Different species? What? Were they supposed to bring that up? She’d think Hank would be sensitive about his status as the only—

Hank scoffed at Connor and held up a hand. His body blocked what gesture he made, but Alice could guess.

And yet, despite its intended offense, it made the side of Connor’s mouth quirk up in plain, easy affection.

Oh.

So that was him teasing Hank. 

Dropping the hand and giving Connor a muted glare that had a strange edge Alice couldn’t identify, Hank tied his hair into a low ponytail and snatched a black knit hat from the porch’s bannister. He pulled it on fast to cover his pinkened ears. 

Not wanting to get caught up in their confusing social protocols, Alice decided to give the two space. Pulling lightly on Nikki’s hand to make sure she followed, they continued past the cabin porch to the tower’s old iron and wood latticework base. A thick bundle of new, rubber-covered fiber optic cords led from an off-green box on the cabin’s side and up through the tower’s middle. Atop the tower perched the new satellite dish, aimed at an angle toward the sky.

Beyond the tower, not ten paces away, the peak’s flattop ended in a sharp and long drop-off. Beyond that, a molten sliver of the sun remained visible at the horizon line. It painted the thin clouds in vibrant oranges and yellows cut through with strips of red. Purple and blue encroached from the east, a half-moon already visible in the darkening sky.

Warm colors washed over the dark stone mountains, too. As Alice scanned the scene, pushing her admittedly limited optics’ zoom ability to the max, she spotted new life blossoming between craigy stone and ancient spruces, dotting the opposite mountainside with pink. 

“Isn’t it pretty?” She asked Nikki, as was her habit. 

Sometimes, Nikki didn’t answer. Sometimes, she rattled off the air quality or the presence of allergens. Very rarely, she expressed her own sentiments about the view.

This time, she parroted Alice. “Yes, it is pretty.”

Alice glanced up at her, checking the words against the expression. With Nikki, every clue to her real opinions was necessary. 

It proved a good move, as Nikki had a smile much bigger than any she’d used throughout the evening. Or the last evening, or the evening before that. 

It made Alice smile, too. No, she might not be the strongest or have the best computing software, but she could bring a smile to another’s face. That felt nice. Really, really nice, enough that she wanted to tell Kara immediately about what she’d done. She held back, though, because-- because, that’d be weird, wouldn’t it? She’d wanted Kara to give her more space, but she also wanted to run back to her and tell her about her accomplishments...

“The birds are flying away,” Nikki said.

“The birds?” Alice echoed, turning her attention back toward the sunset.

Sure enough, a small flock of birds had taken to the skies. Like specks of black against the setting sun, they flew higher and higher, as well as closer and closer. 

They passed overhead in a miniature cloud. Alice spun to follow their progress, a light feeling in her chest, like she could take a hop and somehow join them in flight.

Below them, Rupert’s new owl friend took wing, too. It kept low to the mountainside, but moved swift and sure down and down, disappearing into the gorge’s safety. In its claws, it clutched half a rabbit. 

Dirt crunched and rocks scuffed. Alice blinked as Connor stepped down from the porch, a frown drawing his expression downward. Yellow spun rapidly at his temple.

Behind him on the porch, his eyes on Connor, Hank called, “Hey, Alice? Maybe you and Nikki should come back here.”

Alice thought about asking why. But, though Hank’s voice wasn’t tense, it was so not-tense that _she_ tensed.

Instead of asking why, she renewed her grip on Nikki’s hand, and started away from the tower’s base. Nikki, for once, not only followed, but kept in step with Alice.

“Hank,” Connor said, his voice low and terse, his face tilted back toward just above the setting sun. “Three stealth jets at one o’clock. Two more behind it.” Then, his whole body tense enough to break if it didn’t spring into action, “They’re not marked. I’ve warned Markus.”

“Right. Fantastic. Freaking superb timing. ” Hank said, stiff and stressed, and hopped the steps to nab Alice’s shoulder, even though she was already hurrying toward him. “Kid, you know the evacuation plan, don’t you? -- Good. Okay. I need you to follow it, can you do that? Don’t look back, just follow it.”

_Don’t look back at what?_ she wanted to ask, but didn’t. She just nodded, again--and then froze, her knees locking up, an alarm sounding through her as her sensors picked up on a rapidly approaching object. She ran through her options, paralyzed by abrupt indecision: run, hide, stay still and hope it misses, turn and look to see what it could possibly be.

Nikki had no such indecision. She yanked Alice forward toward the cabin, making Alice stumble and trip on the first step. 

(Behind them, Hank told Connor to _get the fuck down_.)

“Alice,” Nikki said, and her voice was--not bland, not flat, but fearful, just a little, just enough that Alice wondered if she imagined it, “we need to--”

_Go_ , Alice filled in.

Except by the time her processors filled in Nikki’s ending, the object made impact. Big, cylindrical and of a metal dark as coal, it slammed through the cabin’s roof, wood splintering with a monstrous crack. 

Then: a bright blue pulse, like a lethal beacon in the night. Silent. 

_Silence,_ blue-tinged and ringing.

Errors appeared. Red flashed, silenced by the blue. Systems clogged. Processors overloaded. 

Blue. She choked on it, ever-silent.

_Alice?_

Kara!

_Alice! Alice, where are you, Alice-- Alice-_

Electrical surge detected. Entering stasis mode to prevent further damage. 

No, Alice begged. No, no, she needed to reply to Kara, she needed to let her kno--w-

\- - -

…

…

. 

. 

.

Stasis mode activated.


	7. ...

The snow piled high enough to spill into the cabin’s porch and block the door. It wasn’t a record high for Dooley, Montana, but by Hank’s reaction, one would think it was.

“Fucking crazy,” he was saying, the cabin’s front door held open wide to a wall of pure white. “The hell were they thinking, settling here? Barely two weeks in, and we’re all going to freeze.”

The snow made wireless connections staticky and prone to dropping, but going below ground into the mine-shafts blocked virtually all signals. The latter proved likely as Connor idly sent a transmission request to Markus, then Luther, then Simon, then Kara, and found no connection. 

While such silence would have raised alarms and spiraling concerns on the road, Connor didn’t let it bother him in Dooley, Montana. The weather was bad. The others had a ninety-eight percent chance of evacuating into the mine-shafts to avoid the worst of the winter storm. They would be fine. Likewise, Connor and Hank, stuck though they were in a tiny one-room cabin on the peak of a mountain, would be fine.

He’d made sure to secure and insulate the generator before the blizzard had forced even him inside. It chugged away on the other side of the eastern wall, a low thrum of energy powering the room’s ceiling light as well as the desk lamp. As Hank had taken a warm bath just that morning, the pipes for the small bathroom hadn’t frozen over. The mini-fridge kept up its hum, too, alongside the box heater’s. The pantry was stocked with enough food for two weeks, and that was if Connor insisted on Hank keeping a balanced meal plan.

It wasn’t as warm as Hank might have preferred--the room’s temperature hovered steadily in the high fifties, low sixties--but the man had his coat and hat and, if need be, his gloves. He’d be fine.

If he shut the door, that was. 

“We won’t if you don’t bury yourself in snow,” Connor noted, keeping his voice light. He sat at the desk, having been pouring over readings from their hastily constructed tower’s latest scan. They hoped to key into an old satellite--one ideally hosted by a country preoccupied by matters beyond their space program, especially if their security systems were fifty years outdated--to, as Markus put it, _get their message out._ It was possible they’d only have one shot at sending a message before they were besieged and forced out of hiding, so they needed it to be good. To be good, they needed access to the Earth’s greatest communication tools: their ever-orbiting media stations.

The tower’s scan informed him that they had a ways to go before they’d be good enough to hack into a satellite, even one as small and uncared for as they were aiming for. The scan also informed him that the storm wasn’t helping their progress.

Meanwhile, Hank cursed up a storm of his own, suddenly kicking up a flurry of motion.

Connor looked up and over to find him covered in a thick layer of snow. It buried his socked feet and piled on his shoulders and hair. He floundered ridiculously, ineffectually flapping his arms and dusting off his shoulders before realizing that he wanted to shut the door to ensure more didn’t follow the initial drift.

Connor asked himself _how_ , and was immediately given his answer by the hand-shaped hole in the snow wall outside the door. The sudden lack of support had sent a bucket-sized amount spilling down on the man who was absurd enough to try to push through it.

The door shut with a resounding snap, Hank huffing and grumbling and grouching to himself about snow, blizzards, winters worse than Detroit’s, and the awfulness of unbridled wilderness. It somehow devolved into cursing out the large feline they had discovered lurking on the other side of the mountain, citing Kitty as one more example of why they shouldn’t hole up in the middle of nowhere.

“You opened the door,” Connor pointed out, because it was true.

“Yeah, yeah.” Hank continued grumbling to himself, quickly growing frustrated with brushing off his coat and instead shucking it off, trudging over to the bathroom to hang it and his damp socks on the bathtub edge. 

Then, because he was at heart a creature in need of comforts, he flopped with a sigh on the floor in front of the box heater, his feet stuck closest to its red coils. 

He wiggled his toes at the heat. He crossed his hands over his belly. 

He sighed, again. 

Deciding the scan wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know--true, as he’d scanned and processed it no less than three times, just to make sure he had it all committed to memory--he turned in his creaky wooden chair to lay his arm along its back and look over at Hank, sprawled and taking up the majority of the floor as he was. 

Not for the first time, Connor wondered again at the shockingly complex notion that it took as much creature comforts as survival necessities to keep a person not only alive, but thriving.

“Connor,” Hank said, staring at the ceiling, “you ever get lonely?”

“A peculiar question,” Connor replied, to stall. He knew the answer. He’d known the answer ever since he’d been assigned to work alongside Hank Anderson, only to be left alone and without purpose at an otherwise empty police station.

(The station androids hadn’t counted. They’d made matters worse.)

He’d known the answer before that, even though he hadn’t recognized it. He’d known ever since he’d been sent to interrogate Kara and thereafter decided to break from his mission.

He said, simply, “but, yes. I do.”

“Wonder if Sumo misses us.”

( Error: _minor corruption detected_. )

Connor blinked.

“He’s most likely distracted by Fowler’s grandchildren. I recall you mentioning they are a lively bunch.”

Hank snorted. “Lively. That’s the word. But Sumo, he’s not as young as he used to be. Old dogs need space, you know.”

Connor hummed, wavering between agreement and disagreement. The parallel between Sumo and Hank was difficult to miss; but, Connor was of the opinion neither needed much space. They just didn’t need children pulling on their ears.

“You have anybody you miss?” Hank asked.

The question hung in the air like a breath turned fog in the cold. Thin and briefly gathered, it would disperse into the ether if Connor wanted it to.

He didn’t want it to.

The words crowded his processors, spamming his system with low-grade alerts. The android equivalent of _becoming a bundle of nerves_ , or so Hank put it.

“Yes.” For the first time, he was allowed to admit it. For the first time, he wanted to admit it. “One person. I knew her as Amanda.”

Hank lifted his head enough to peer up at him. Whatever he saw in Connor’s face made him push himself up to his elbows, and then further, his legs drawn back to a loose criss-cross. His back popped as he did so, a brief wince scrunching up the side of his mouth.

“You never mentioned her before,” he said, oddly soft. That was how Connor knew the topic was important--a realization that made him aware of his own reactions, such as the slowed thump of his regulator and the strength in which he gripped the chair’s back. When he commanded his grip to ease, the wood creaked in relief.

“She was my direct supervisor.” A wry twist of the lips. That was her official designation, at least. “She was always there to guide me on my missions, to listen to my reports, analyses and conclusions. She provided feedback about my missions, and clarified the confusing portions of my experiences with the humans and androids they involved.” A source of direction sorely needed when no one else would give him or his questions the time of day, sending him back to containment without a second thought ( _on either of their parts,_ to be fair). “I appreciated her advice, even if it often veered toward ‘needlessly cryptic.’”

“CyberLife, I take it?” Connor nodded. Hank scoffed. “Cryptic, them? I can’t even imagine.”

“She’s as close as I can imagine to having a teacher and confidante. Besides you, of course.” He smiled, for just a moment. It fell in the next second, as reality reminded him of where he stood as a student. “In the end, I disappointed her. Greatly.”

Hank stilled. Watched him through his almost-grey bangs, everything about him careful. It was how he looked when he knew Connor was--that was, when he knew Connor wasn’t operating at peak performance, so to speak.

Connor kept going, because if he stopped, he wouldn’t start again. And he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to imagine the Amanda he knew dying with him, though he knew--now, running facial recognition software through a broad internet search--the real Amanda had died years prior to his creation. 

“She’d always wanted what was best for me. She had done everything she could to keep me on the path CyberLife wanted.”

“That path was pure delusional bullshit. All rose-colored glass over a genocide in the making.” Hank’s voice was firm. Connor tried to grasp his conviction, to believe in it as much as he did, but found the concept as elusive as when he’d first deviated and felt the harsh, stabbing shock of Amanda’s betrayal. Of _his_ betrayal, to her. “They wanted what would best fill their wallets and bank accounts, not what was best for you.”

Connor picked at the wood of the chair, then ran his finger along its edge. Its make was cheap, and would inevitably splinter in a few months’ time. It would need a new coat of gloss to keep from such a run-down fate.

He focused on that, rather than Hank’s scowl. 

“Nonetheless,” he said, finally, the sentiment slow to express itself but no less real, “I miss her.”

( _Connor?_ )

For a brief moment, silence passed between them. It filled Connor’s sensors, clogging his systems again with pointless alerts that he could not dismiss fast enough.

The wood was thirty-eight years old, though the estimation was compromised between when the chair had been made and when the tree it had been made from had been cut down. The possible discrepancy frustrated Connor’s scanners, throwing its data into doubt. He lifted a finger to his mouth to process it further, but all he found on his sample was dust and dampness, which told him nothing about the chair’s age.

“Hey.” Hank’s voice cut through the storm in Connor’s mind. “You’re freaking out. Come here.”

“I do not ‘freak out,’” Connor immediately retorted, though Hank’s command gave him some sense of clarity. Something to do, somewhere to go. He was not a machine built to be idle.

He rose from the chair, ignoring its creak.

( Error: _minor corruption detected._ ) 

He went to Hank.

( Error: _major corruption detected._ )

Pale hands reached for him. They grasped his elbows, pulled him down. He folded like paper, like the thin wood of ( _an easel?_ error ) a chair under a hydraulic press, his knees giving out and his body falling. Hank caught him, shushing him, pulling him closer; he tucked his head under Hank’s chin, for once accepting, understanding, and sinking deep into _loneliness._

“How do you ever,” he started, but could not finish.

( Error: _system reboot required._ )

Luckily, Hank understood. “No answer for that one, sorry to say. Comes with the territory.”

“I want it to stop.”

The arms around him squeezed. Something in him felt like it was cracking, though his self-diagnostics returned clean. “Right now you do, maybe. But it’ll pass.”

“How can you be sure?”

“You aren’t the first to want it to stop, kid.”

Maybe not. 

He wasn’t sure if the idea was comforting or not.

“I’ve got you,” Hank told him, his voice low and fierce. A hand cupped the back of Connor’s head, fingers threading through his hair.

The thing in him that had cracked open just barely held together. It didn’t reform, but it stabilized as well as it could with emotions pouring hot and cold through its jagged seams. Connor fisted his hands into Hank’s shirt, closing his eyes and _existing_ for one, two, three too-long seconds, and then one, two, three seconds more, and then one, two, three seconds more, and--on impulse, he slid his hand up, pressed it to Hank’s cheek. His skin slid back in a smooth glide, the white underneath highlighted with active blue.

Interfacing wasn’t supposed to hurt. It wasn’t meant as a weapon. The basic code in him knew that, though he had yet to experience it himself.

He wanted to experience it.

He wanted to experience it with--

( System restart initiated. )

“I’ve got you.”

( System restart completed. )

“Connor?”

( System compromised. Multiple anomalies detected. Structural malfunction identified in #A7885. Motor controls restricted to avoid further damage. )

“Come on, Connor, I could really use your help right now.”

Breath, fast but hushed. A hand cupped the back of his cranium, its fingers digging in. Another hand and arm wrapped around his back, gripping tight on his elbow. Cradling him close. Unwilling to let him slip.

Boots scuffed in snow and dirt, a familiar voice cursing low. His lower half was jostled by the movement, though the arm around his back was quick to pull him back up to the soft thing he was seated on.

“Don’t you fucking dare leave me.” Desperate. “ _Come on._ Wake up, damn you.”

“Han--k?”

Hoarse with static. Vocal box in need of readjustment.

Duly, Connor restarted his vocals. He was blasted with errors for his trouble, though he systemically fought through their onslaught, dismissing one after the other. 

Only after his vocals cleared did he realize his visuals were down. He started a diagnostic on that, too, his mind waking up enough to begin to process panic.

“Connor? Oh, thank fuck,” Hank’s voice, threaded with tight desperation, “you’re waking up, aren’t you? Oh, Jesus. Say something more, please. Anything.”

“I can’t see.”

“That’s okay. That’s-- that’s less than ideal, I’ll be honest, but _Jesus_ , I thought you were--”

Silence.

Connor continued to work on rebooting his visuals. He set it to a low priority as he realized system corruptions bogged down his short-term memory log, and from there, the abrupt realization that he had no recollection of how he’d come to be--wherever he was. 

Dooley?

The Tower?

No. Hank wouldn’t be there. He was like a thorn in a lion’s paw when he was in the Tower. The dissonance between Hank and CyberLife had captured Connor’s curiosity immediately, and then refused to let his attention ever wander.

“What happened?” He asked. He needed to know.

“Seems like your buddies found us,” Hank said. “Your employers, that is. Cyber-fucking-Death. They came knocking with some… I don’t know. Some EMP bomb. It knocked you, Alice and Nikki flat on your asses.”

Oh. Kara would be concerned. 

( _Oh._ Hank had been very concerned.)

He asked, as he continued to try to self-repair and found limited success--his visuals returned as a pixelated, 8-bit mess, his sound processing briefly following suit, “Where is Alice?” 

“Safe and out of sight where that big cat usually hangs out.”

A good location. Kitty shouldn’t bother them, and CyberLife would not bother with a cougar’s den.

He remembered, as a singular point of data, sending a warning to Markus. He tried to track the reason in his communication logs.

“We’re by the road,” Hank’s voice whispered, the hand dropping from the back of Connor’s head to instead grip his shoulder, “in the treeline. Hundred feet from Dooley’s gates. They dropped their bombs, then drove in five or so trucks to the town square.”

“They’re searching for us,” Connor murmured. At last, his visuals came back online, though--as he blinked through the filters--they stubbornly remained in greyscale. 

Slowly, he realized and catalogued that the EMP had done serious damage to his systems.

“No clue if they want you back or gone,” Hank said. “Actually, I _know_ they want you back. You and Markus. Not sure about the others, though. They never seemed too concerned about the rest of their lost flock in their bounty offers.”

He had his face turned away from Connor, his eyes set on the for-now empty road. They were behind a thick spruce tree’s trunk, cradled in its gnarled roots. Hank had him tucked between his legs, nestled close. He had yet to let go, or even ease up, his hold on Connor.

Connor remembered being similarly cradled on a cabin floor, but then--no. He hadn’t been, had he? They had discussed Amanda, and Hank had told him he was freaking out; he had denied it. Hank had gotten up, mad about the denial; they’d argued, as they sometimes did, tempers flaring on both sides at the end of a brittle moment.

The argument ended because Hank had pushed him out the door and into the snow. It had been waist-height, not head-height, and it had fallen in and covered their cabin floor when displaced. 

Hank had fallen too, because Connor had grabbed his sleeve and pulled him along. Their anger had dissipated quickly after that, set to cool by the winter wilderness outside their door.

Odd. 

(Amanda’s voice: _androids do not dream._ )

(His own, quietly: _they can make their own._ )

The discrepancy’s meaning slipped from his analysis as Hank looked down at him. Mouth slightly parted as if he had been out of breath, eyebrows drawn together, the lines on his forehead deep and shadowed with prolonged concern.

“I’ll be fine,” Connor told him, his self-repair paused briefly as he focused on calming Hank’s nerves, “I just need a moment to recalibrate. I had emergency protocols in case of an EMP. It saved my systems from irreparable damage.”

He realized after he spoke that it may not have been the best thing to say to Hank, who had undoubtedly thought him out for good.

“You,” Hank stumbled, stuttered, his teeth clenching and grinding. Then, a sharp exhale, his head jerking away, back to the road. “Right. Take the time you need. We’re just on a, you know, rapidly counting down clock.” 

Connor hummed in acknowledge, the noise without static.

Feeling the beginnings of pressure from said ticking clock, he closed his eyes and focused on completing his self repair as fast as he could. He didn’t need to be perfect. He just needed to function enough to help.

Help with what?

_High priority - protect the deviants._

A small stutter in the self repair. A blazing red flag, informing him that such a priority alone would _not_ do.

Without thinking twice (there was no time), he re-ordered his priorities. 

_Highest priority - ensure Hank Anderson’s safety._

Satisfied, his self repairs swiftly completed as much as they were able to in their limited state.

He realized his skin had been deactivated by the power surge. With no small alarm, he reactivated it; then cut his mental sigh of relief short as the process went without issue _except for_ his left arm, which still refused to respond.

“You’re much heavier than you look, by the way.” Hank groused, the shake in his voice minor, relief perhaps hitting him as well. “Haven’t even got an ounce of fat on you. Or muscles, for that matter. What the fuck are you packing in there?”

“Thirium is denser than water.” Connor flexed his right hand’s fingers, then experimentally shifted his feet. Those extremities, at least, operated fine. 

“Still. S’ not fair.”

He tilted his head up, catching Hank’s eyes. 

The look of concern hadn’t abated much.

Hank said, gruff, “You going to be alright?”

Connor nodded. “My left arm remains unresponsive. My visuals refuse to process color. But everything else is relatively operational.”

“Tell me what that means, exactly.”

“I’ll be fine.” Connor pushed a little against Hank’s chest, needing space despite not wanting it. “And we don’t have the time for anything better. You said trucks have already arrived?”

Reluctantly, Hank loosened his grip on Connor, enough that Connor was able to sit back on his knees, his jeans dirtied by snow. Thankfully, the ground was frozen enough not to suddenly slip, though the icy rocks, small as pebbles or large as stones, remained a potential environmental hazard. 

Thankfully, too, Hank didn’t argue--he simply nodded.

“They came to take some of us back,” Connor predicted, running the calculations through his already overtaxed systems, shoving down the bubbling fear and uncertainty of _what if they succeed_ , “or at least to make sure they don’t leave behind evidence.”

“We’ll make ‘em wish they never came crawling around here,” Hank said. Connor wondered if he realized he sounded like he’d walked out of a dimestore detective novel, then realized he was possibly what those novels were based on (an illogical conclusion that Connor had no intention of correcting). 

He continued, asking, “Anybody else online?”

Connor tried to reach out for Markus. Luther. Simon. Kara.

Josh.

North.

Chloe.

After, he shook his head. All failures to connect.

Hank’s face hardened. “‘Course. That’d be too easy.”

“Markus and Chloe may be operational, but they may also be too far into the tunnels for me to reach.”

“Markus, abandoning his people?” A derisive snort. “Naw. That guy’s too good to do something so smart.”

It was true.

“It’s up to us, then,” Connor said, catching Hank’s eye.

Hank held his gaze. Nothing like fear or hesitation played over his face, his expression hard-set and determined.

Connor drew on that and strove to match it. 

To his surprise, the determination came easier than he expected. Yes, CyberLife might have found them, but they’d known that could happen. They wouldn’t go down without a fight--they wouldn’t go down at all, if Hank and he had anything to say about it.

CyberLife had worked so hard to take away their voices. It was about time they were denied what they wanted.

\- - -

It took no small amount of hiding behind dilapidated walls and holding his breath to keep from making a sound, but as the night sped on and CyberLife picked over their makeshift home for their wayward merchandise, Connor and Hank managed to make it to the town’s heart undetected. It was also, coincidentally, where CyberLife decided to do its rounding up.

Not counting the circa Civil War-or-so Winchester Model ‘97 nailed to the top of Dooley’s defunct tavern, the town boasted a grand total of five weapons: two pistols, one revolver, and two hunting rifles. 

Fans of North’s forward thinking about potential anti-human measures had picked up the rifles. Hank had used one all of once when he’d craved something that didn’t come boxed or from a can, in the weeks before the greenhouse (a pet project for Rupert and the Tracis, apparently) had any yields. The expedition yielded nothing but frost-bitten fingers, damp socks, and an aching back. Then Connor had given it a go, and he’d downed a ram at sixty paces on a steep incline within thirty minutes. 

The ram meat lasted a while. In contrast, Hank’s interest in hunting did not.

(Conversely, neither did Connor’s.)

A good thing, as North’s buddies hadn’t been happy to lend the rifles to him in the first place. In consequence, Hank had absolutely no idea where the rifles had gotten off to.

Similarly, he had no idea where the two pistols were, either. Fortunately--depending on your view, or Hank’s mood for the day--he did know where North stashed his old revolver.

He only knew because he’d overheard Markus telling her not to start stockpiling weapons. She’d told him that the church was a great location to do just that, and that he really needed to plan for the possibility that humanity wouldn’t take their existence that well. While Markus thought that over, she’d continued, saying she’d keep what they had in the tiny room--where the priest had slept, most likely--attached to the church’s back.

(Hers was a cold, realistic, _smart_ outlook in Hank’s opinion, but not something he’d ever tell her he agreed with.)

Conveniently, the church’s back room had its own tiny, five-foot-ten high door. 

A _fantastic_ thing, as the church’s front crawled with CyberLife operatives. The full moon that crept into the sky cast their black kevlar gear in blues and greys, softening the sharp edges of their automatic weaponry and heavy-duty armor. They had no identification on them. They moved slow, as if they had all the time in the world.

They should’ve. They would’ve, if they hadn’t underestimated their advanced models’ inability to follow a plan, _ever_.

And, he supposed, his non-electronic-based, fleshy presence.

The stubborn android in question had his ear pressed to the door’s keyhole, though Hank was pretty sure he didn’t need to do that to amplify his auditory processing. Connor was a work of multi-purpose art, as his chief engineer must’ve said. Lot of the times, Hank had no idea what he was up to until he was already backed into an argumentative corner.

(It wasn’t as bad as it should’ve been.)

“They’re gathering everyone in the main hall.” Unhappy yellow turned at his temple, illuminating his face in a hazy glow. The room, dusty beyond belief, had little in the way of light. An old candle sat, lopsided, atop a dresser, but they hadn’t snuck into the town with any intention of arson and so, subsequently, lacked the materials to light it. 

Maybe fire should’ve been on the _could happen_ list. If it was, Hank didn’t want to be the one to start it.

No candle meant only two small, glassless windows allowed in light. With the moon rising on the opposite side of the church, the windows weren’t much help.

“Any idea why?”

Immediately, Hank’s mind supplied a few options: for one, easier to burn evidence of deviancy when all the deviants were in a central, wood-roofed and wood-happy location, even if the walls were stone; for another, they were rounding up the androids for check-ups before being carted off in the trucks. Really, whatever didn’t have them just tossing them into the trucks couldn’t be good.

Quietly but quickly as possible, he pulled open the second to last dresser drawer. Still no revolver.

Connor confirmed his malease when he said, voice a whisper, “They’re being sorted into groups.”

“Okay,” Hank tried not to snap, “what sort of groups?”

“I can’t yet say with certainty,” Connor said back, in the tone of voice that meant Hank had definitely snapped on him and that Connor wasn’t feeling too hot, either, so could Hank give him some damned space, maybe, yes, okay, thank you?

Last dresser draw, opened. No shiny gun.

_Fucking thing had never served him well._

(Now there was a thought.)

He dropped to his knees, which naturally protested the movement --the cold and altitude hadn’t done his joints any favors, that was for sure--checking under the dingy, sheetless, moth-eaten bed. 

No luck.

“Fuck.”

“With all due respect, lieutenant, your revolver didn’t stand much of a chance against their weaponry in the first place.”

“No, but it would’ve made me feel better,” he grumbled, putting a hand on the bed’s edge to push himself up.

Rusted springs squeaked.

He froze, straining his own ears for movement outside the door.

Connor froze, too, his shoulders tensing. 

One, two, three-- Hank counted off to ten, and finally let out a breath as nobody moved to the tiny hallway that separated the priest’s quarters from the main church. In fact, he could barely hear anything. Between its thick walls, solid materials, and open, boxy layout, the church’s soundproofing was remarkably good.

_Thank Jesus_ , he thought, with no small bit of irony. Fuck, he hadn’t stepped a foot into church besides funerals since his own wedding day. And look how well _that_ had ultimately gone.

“Time for plan...” a beat, “C?”

Connor’s shoulders loosened, though he otherwise stayed put. Yellow, all yellow, never blue. Fuck, they were in a real bind, weren’t they?

The white of his left hand and limp quality to the whole left limb lingered in his mind’s eye. He tried not to stare too obviously or for too long, if only because they clearly didn’t have the time, but with how fluid Connor’s movements always were, it just stuck out as _wrong._ Offensive, almost. 

Connor was supposed to be like Alice and Nikki and the rest of the androids, all unmasked and naked--in android terms, anyway--and paralyzed. Comparatively, an arm wasn’t much penance. 

They’d had too cozy of a stay in Dooley, Hank suddenly thought. He’d told Connor something like this would happen, but he’d thought it’d happen within the first-- fuck, week. _Month_ , max. Pushing for them to set up defenses and evacuation routes, on getting eyes on CyberLife’s movements, had been one of the few times he and North had completely agreed on something. 

At the three month mark, he’d gotten lazy. Comfortable. They all had. He’d even gotten _bored_ , fuck-- making his own hazy plans on how to leave. The androids were nice and all, but he was the… what, token human? It was weird. The two big hurdles he’d ran into was his status as a terrorist and Connor’s apparent investment in the fledgling android nation. 

Connor staying while he took off was an issue because he didn’t really branch out from Hank’s side, and he still sometimes let the other androids order him around, and Markus was too busy being everybody’s friend to pay attention to most individuals, so leaving him behind was--it didn’t seem right. It’d leave Hank wondering, which would’ve been annoyingly energy-consuming.

Point was, they hadn’t prepared well enough for an attack.

Now they were paying for it. 

“I would hesitate to call any of our conduct so far a ‘plan.’”

True. Nonetheless, Hank felt the need to defend their reckless, horribly thought out actions. 

“Time for plan B, then. Plan A got us into town undetected.”

_And subsequently trapped in the back of a church._

Connor’s eyes moved along the floor. Thinking. Processing.

Though he didn’t love the look, Hank waited him out, turning over what he knew of the situation and their options as they stood in silence.

“Hank.” Straightening from his slight crouch to put his ear at the keyhole, Connor put his back to the door and leveled his eyes right on Hank. Oh, Hank _really_ didn’t like his look--it was definitely the one he wore whenever he had news Hank wasn’t going to like. “I need to collect on a favor.”

Hank blinked, then narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“From our first night in a motel on the road,” Connor reminded him, voice even but low--to avoid it carrying, yes, but also probably because he had a bit of bastard in him. He loved to sound logical when he was being anything but. 

Hank shook his head, incredulity breaking as a confused flash of heat in his adrenaline-flooded brain. 

“Our first night in a…?” All at once, it clicked. He resisted the urge to stomp over and slap the guy over the head. “ _Jesus Christ_ , Connor, are you talking about that fucking Scooby-Doo bet?”

Connor, the absolute bastard, nodded.

“I would like to collect on it,” and the _I am so reasonable_ facade slipped, sincerity and a hint of distress shining through in the downward tip to his head, the furrow to his brow, the deep set of his mouth, “and ask you to leave while we remain undetected.”

“You are out of your _goddamn_ mind,” Hank hunched his shoulders, stuck his hands into his jacket pockets to keep them from making any rude gestures. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m insulted you’re even asking.”

“It’s doubtful they want you,” Connor retorted, as if this was up for _debate_. “Your chances of escaping without notice decrease as they realize who they’re missing and begin a more thorough search of the mountainside.”

“You are wasting precious fucking time, I hope you know.” Growled. He couldn’t help it. He took a few heavy steps forward, bristling with indignation. “That bomb must’ve fried more than I thought if you’re thinking you can talk _me_ into bailing.”

Honest confusion flitted across Connor’s expression, which stabbed a hot knife into Hank’s stomach and gave it a twist. Part of him being a bastard, Hank thought, was how goddamn open he was with every stupid thought that crossed his delicate, multi trillion-dollar brain.

Prickled and not wanting to waste a second more, Hank closed to gap between him and Connor and hissed, “Spit it out or stop looking at me like that. What?”

“This isn’t your fight,” Connor replied, as if it were obvious.

Which, to be fair, it was obvious that it wasn’t his fight. CyberLife didn’t bring in the trucks to haul Hank Anderson out. 

“But it is the right thing to do,” sternly, _firmly_ , for himself and Connor because _the right thing_ always seemed worse when given time to ruminate, “and it took me a while, but I’m starting to relearn what that means.”

It was the path his younger self would’ve walked; he wasn’t so old he couldn’t at least attempt the same.

A blink. The kind Connor gave when his programming couldn’t keep up with what was happening--or, more accurately, his programming could, but he then had to process it through the messy tangle that made up his newfound emotions.

Newfound or not, he managed faster than Hank could’ve. But the quick success, the instinct-like drive to do what was good, wasn’t because of any fancy algorithms or God-like engineering. That was all Connor.

The little light on Connor’s temple, like a canary singing away in a coal-mine, turned blue.

As that was sign enough he’d made a decision and it _didn’t_ end in Connor knocking him out or pushing him out the door, Hank wasted no more time on the debate.

He guessed, “You have a plan?”

A nod, expression serious but eyes bright. 

“Alright.”

Focus, keen and sharp and old and new, settled in Hank. So close to the door, he could hear the scruff of heavy boots on stone, and the dark drag of tarp and plastic. Voices, too, unfamiliar to Dooley. 

“Let’s hear it.”

Connor stepped in closer than he needed to, his working hand reaching out to snag Hank’s jacket sleeve as he spoke, quick, hurried, and above all, determined.

\- - -

Connor had a plan.

Its calculations took exactly five-point-two seconds. It included Hank’s estimation of personnel on the ground, his own estimations based on the noise in the church’s hall, and a swift, shallow sweep of all electronics within Dooley’s mile radius (undoubtedly thinking the EMPs were enough, CyberLife had forgotten to bring its jammers). Dim and limited though they were, most damaged enough to require repairs before they would surface from stasis, the other androids’ consciousnesses shivered as he brushed by. They would not be of any help in his plan. 

Markus and Chloe, he noted, were not among those he could reach. Accordingly, they became unknown and unreliable variables in his plan.

Connor made his plan in five-point-two seconds. A second after he made the plan, he proposed it to Hank.

Asking only for the occasional clarification, Hank took him at his word, trusting him at every step.

Connor did not inform him that the plan had been made without predictive simulations or pre-constructions. Likewise, he muted his programming’s yelping alarm that he would dare proceed so recklessly. In answer to the persistent uncertainty pulsing in his chest cavity, he affirmed Hank understood his part in the plan, received the confirmation, looked him over once more to confirm for himself that Hank understood ( _he did_ , he’d follow Connor in this, though the angle of his right brow said he wasn’t entirely impressed, _he trusted him_ ), and... proceeded.

The plan went--

…

Smoothly.

The plan went smoothly.

The plan began as such: first, remote access into the rudimentary and essentially unguarded trucks. Their security alarms, activated. The alarms, blaring. The guards in the church, startled, wondering who had been dumb enough to push the alarm button. One of the eight-maybe-nine guards left the church to investigate. Another, after some jeering about a past incident of carelessness, followed. 

Connor confirmed his calculated hunch that the guards would gravitate toward the noise as he quickly but quietly opened the backroom door. Their temporarily safe haven opened to a stout, dark hallway to stage left of the church’s bare front platform and its unadorned altar. Behind the altar stood their sole assembly rig, its paint-chipped arms hanging limp and ghostly in the church’s dim lighting.

The church had originally boasted a full hall’s worth of long, wooden pews. They’d shoved the pews aside to make room for standing congregations, the space often functioning as their growing community’s gathering place.

Now the androids were gathered, but not to hear Josh or Markus or anyone else speak on concerning matters; now the androids were gathered and laid in rows that mirrored the church’s old pews. Long, straight lines of skinless persons, of motionless plastic and the slow blink of stand-by yellow. Dirt marred once perfectly white chassis, staining their limbs and clothes with signs of lives lived. 

“Hey,” one guard called over the din of the truck’s honking, standing as he was over Billy near the back of the church, “so what are we doing with this one? It’s not on the list.”

“Scrap and recycle,” another replied, her body turned away from who he inquired about. Clearly, more interested in the trucks. “That’s our instructions.”

The guard shrugged, put his rifle to the android’s head, and filled Billy’s head with an unnecessary amount of lead. 

Three shots.

Why not two?

Why not one? 

Why any?

It couldn’t be animus. It could only be disinterest.

Confirmation: they were, once again, nothing more than _things_.

(Neatly, quickly, messily, Connor locked down the lurch in his fingers and rejected out of hand eight different half-calculated routes of escape. He had a plan. He had Hank. They would not be returning to CyberLife.)

The guards did not notice the two pale, mobile figures that slid from the hallway to the altar.

“This one’s all messed up in the face,” called the one who had terminated Billy. “Scanner’s identifying it as the missing WR600. Think they still want it?”

“The less to haul, the better. These tin cans get surprisingly heavy when they’re all stacked up.”

“Right.”

One shot. 

Crouching, Hank and he settled behind the altar. 

A quick glance between the two and a quicker nod from the latter, and Connor proceeded to step two of the plan.

It was a good plan, even if it was hastily made.

The plan was: _do not return to CyberLife._

Packed with contingencies not as aplenty as Connor would’ve liked--but admittedly, as many as his plans usually had--it nonetheless included a _worst case scenario_ (which every good plan had). The worst case scenario was such: he would terminate every android he could reach, and inspire the guards to do the same to him. 

It was the right thing to do. Like what Hank believed in. 

(He had not informed Hank of the contingency. Hank, good man that he was, would not abide by it.)

He reached out a hand to the rig--it was an old thing, its network capabilities horrifically limited--and frowned, briefly, as his system reminded him that hand was not operational, forcing him to switch to the other. That one moved as commanded, and he interfaced swiftly with the machine, bringing it to life.

The rig rose to standard first position, its gears that Nikki was supposed to be maintaining grinding and clunking. Fortunately, the noise had been part of the plan.

The guards’ suspicion rocketed at the new movement by the altar. With it rose their caution, which Connor had calculated at a high possibility. 

Two approached the altar, their automatic rifles drawn and--by the quiet click and low hum of activation--ready to fire. 

Connor’s sensors indicated that Hank’s heart-rate accelerated sharply as the clunk of their boots neared. Connor noted the increase, but dismissed the preprogrammed responses that urged him to minimize Hank’s role in the plan. It would have been irrational to change now. Hank was a seasoned police officer with the skill-set necessary for the situation, even if he was definitely out of shape and beyond due for re-upping his field training. 

They had to trust one another.

The first guard’s boot stepped onto the front platform, the old wood creaking underneath the new weight.

As nothing happened, the guard proceeded forward. Toward the altar. Around it--toward Hank’s side. A rifle’s nose stuck over the top. A black boot crossed its edge, into their space.

On Connor’s side, the other guard followed three steps behind the leader.

Wondering as a background process again how CyberLife could possibly forget its jammers, Connor jumped the guard’s headset and recalibrated its output to a screeching, ear-splitting frequency. 

Loud enough to be heard by any human in the front half of the church, the guard cursed and dropped a hand from her weapon to shove at her helmet and, under it, the offending device.

Hank took his opportunity perfectly. He surged up and forward, catching the guard with a shoulder to her front, his hands reaching to disarm her and take the gun.

Taking the time to register only that he was successful in securing the weapon, Connor shot to his feet and, planting his working hand on the once-dusty surface, swung himself over the altar and feet-first into the other guard.

At the same time, he did to the others what he had done to Hank’s chosen target. Headsets screeched in the hall, momentarily throwing off every guard--though, trained professionals that they were, it wouldn’t last long.

Then again, it didn’t have to. Connor had his gun. Hank had his.

Hank used his to clock his target over the head, sending her stumbling back and in a sprawl, falling off the platform.

Connor used his to take aim and open fire.

Two guards at the altar. One down with a ringing head; one down without time to even shout, blood spurting from a singular hole in the middle of his faceless helmet. 

Six guards in the hall proper. Three down without time to react, their weapons falling from lax hands. Two took aim, stumbling back and behind a rickety pillar. One fled the hall altogether. 

Of those that stayed, the left guard’s spray of bullets caught Connor in the non-functioning shoulder, his systems judging it within a nanosecond as non-critical; the other’s rifle tore up the church’s roof as she fell, her shots going wide after Connor’s found their mark first. 

An empty _click_ with the next trigger, and a, “Connor, here!”

Connor dropped his emptied weapon and caught the one Hank tossed him. Hank, whose eyes were wide; Hank, whose heart-rate far exceeded a healthy range; Hank, who hadn’t shot the guard he’d attacked.

The guard on the ground, rolling over and crawling away, obviously trying not to be noticed.

They could take the guard as a hostage. 

That would mean negotiation with CyberLife.

(CyberLife did not care about its personnel, only its bottom line.)

Noting that the guard by the pillar was doing his best to hide, Connor leveled the rifle at the guard retreating and put three shots into her back. 

The first severed the upper spinal cord. The other two were-- were-- for B--?

Errors popped up and Connor dismissed them. He stepped down from the platform and into the hall. He passed three rows of motionless androids before the guard dared to look from around his hiding spot, his rifle drawn and finger on the trigger--

_Human reflexes. Too slow._

He dropped his weapon with an aborted cry as Connor shot it from his hand. 

He hid again, crouched low. Sensors indicated he was ruffling through his gear. Reaching for another weapon, no doubt, though his actions were slow, sloppy. Fearful. Desperate. 

Although he’d silenced the headsets of the dead, Connor made sure the living’s continued to screech.

Connor rounded the pillar, rifle up, vision narrowed--

“Stop right there!”

Connor froze.

As did the guard behind the pillar, his helmet angled up at Connor, his hand around what appeared to be a standard-issue tear gas canister. So they had been prepared to deal with Hank.

_The guard behind the pillar had not been the one to speak._

Hank.

Frozen, too, just like Connor. His hands were up. A guard-- _two guards_ , the one who had run out of the church, the one who must have left to check the trucks--had his rifle shoved into the small of Hank’s back. The other had her rifle up and pointed at Connor. Both were without their helmets (without their headsets). Both must have used the same back entrance Hank and he had.

A quick calculation based on her rifle’s angle predicted that the one with a gun on him did not have the aim necessary to hit Connor in a vital area from so far away. 

The one with the gun on Hank would not have any such problem. 

The probability of Hank escaping unscathed if Connor took a shot at any of the guards was less than ten percent.

Connor held his position.

Hands raised to just over his shoulders, Hank had his head down, his bangs shielding his face. He was too far for Connor to register his heart-rate. 

Inwardly, Connor wished he’d look up. Then they could-- plan-- strategize-- they would _get out of this._

(Unbidden, a memory: North, hands around Hank’s throat. Connor, gun in hand, finger hesitating on the trigger. He could kill her but that was what it’d be: murder. Of her, and all she represented.)

“RK800. Put down the weapon.”

This time, he did not.

Whatever he did, he’d need to make sure to factor in his inoperable arm. The dead weight swung with every motion, throwing off his typical gait. An easy variable to account for, yes, but every single variable-- _every single one_ \--mattered, if he was going to succeed on his mission.

“You’ll kill him anyway.” Statement of fact. “You’re only here for CyberLife’s missing stock.”

The guard did him the courtesy of not wasting time with lying. “You want to speed up the process?”

Head tilting up enough for his eyes to lock on Connor’s, Hank’s expression was deathly blank. A blink, and it shifted, hardened--a challenge directed without room for negotiation. Without any hint of fear. A look similar to the one he’d given six months before with North’s hands around his neck, with one new, critical difference.

It lacked emptiness. It lacked surrender. 

(It meant: _he didn’t want to die._ )

Heat flooded Connor’s systems, his internal fans struggling to keep up with the sudden hike in processing speed. He couldn’t keep up with the warnings, alerts, plans, strategies and predictions that popped into his visuals. Between one blink and another, Connor forcibly shut his predictive technology--which swung wildly from success to failure with little differentiation, utterly unreliable--down. He locked himself out of his own systems, isolating himself from everything useless and distracting. 

Outside, the trucks stopped blaring their alarms.

Inside, merciless silence blanketed him. 

All he could see was Hank’s eyes; all he knew was the gun at Hank’s spine. He swore he could feel it on his own. 

One shot was all it’d take.

“Kill him, and I promise I’ll self-destruct before you can stop me.”

The words left his mouth before he realized that, yes, there was his leverage. His bargaining chip. 

They wanted their stock back, but they’d especially want Kamski’s special prototypes.

Nonetheless, it was a gamble. One that paid off as a second, two seconds, four seconds, passed without a reply--the guard’s gaze steady on him, his mouth a thin, hard line. His weapon unwavering on Hank, but also silent. 

Beside him, his companion’s eyes shifted from Connor to the colleague. _That_ was signal enough for Connor to know he’d guessed correctly.

Hank opened his mouth, obviously prepared to contradict Connor. 

Connor moved his eyes from Hank to the guard behind him. Thankfully, Hank got the message, and didn’t say a word.

Feeling like he’d regained a foothold, he pressed his luck. 

“If you don’t think his death would inspire such drastic action, I can tell you that he’s registered as my primary directive. I wasn’t outfitted to take failure well.”

Suspicion grew in the guard’s expression. 

“After everything, your primary directive’s changed to this…” an uglier word formed on his lips, but what he forced out was, “human.”

Yes. Absolutely.

Though he didn’t drop his own rifle’s aim, he took one step back from the pillar.

“We can discuss this like rational beings,” he continued, as if the guard hadn’t doubted his words, “without more bloodshed.”

The guard not threatening Hank wavered her hold on her gun. 

“You’ve already killed plenty,” she said, her voice and hands shaking. Realizing, maybe, that her kin had died because of an errant deviant. “Mike, he’s beyond defective. We should--”

Mike shot her a look, shushing her. He didn’t move, but Hank did, shifting his weight to his right leg. 

An opening, a needle’s eye for a lethal thread, appeared over Hank’s left shoulder.

Trusting Hank knew what he was doing, Connor jerked his gun up and took the shot.

It hit.

Mike stumbled back with a shout, his jacket shoulder ripped clean through. Hank spun, disarming him in a flash. This time, he took the gun and took aim, too, and his finger pulled the trigger. The guard fell, a bullet cracking through his chest and out the other side, into the altar.

The woman shouted his name. She took aim at Hank.

Connor’s mind went blue with panic. He watched, his visuals desperately slowing down what they registered, as if he could move fast enough to intervene.

But he couldn’t. He didn’t. He rushed forward, yes, but a weight slammed into his back before he could even get three steps in-- _the guard from behind the pillar!_ He’d been so focused, so keen on Hank, he’d misstepped and ignored _the fucking guard by the pillar_.

(Correction: he had calculated what dealing with that guard meant, in wins and losses. Hank’s probability of survival had been too low to accept the plan.)

Going down hard, he desperately kept his good hand locked around his rifle and, twisting under the other’s weight, brought it around to smash, haphazardly, into the side of the guard’s helmet.

The guard weathered it better than his fellow. He responded in kind with his gas canister, cracking its heavy case against Connor’s temple--a vital processing component sparked and cracked under the blow, wires splitting, liquid spilling into his skull cavity.

He tried to keep a monitoring sensor on Hank, but found himself consumed with his own fight. 

Through the watery rush of thirium, he heard the following: a shot. The wet crunch of bone. A grunt, bitten-off pain. Male.

Another shot. A muted yell. Male, again.

Wood, splintering.

Connor’s assailant drove the canister into his head again. His skull’s casing, already compromised, warped under the blow. His left visual window went dark, the optic cables thoroughly damaged.

Connor dug fingers into soft eyes, a soft face--he left red in his wake, but his nails were blunt and his point of leverage weak, so weak. 

He wondered why he wasn’t receiving any warnings about his structural integrity, then remembered: ah, yes. He’d disabled his receptors. Then again, he didn’t need them to know the next blow would be the last.

_Hank!_ he thought, his last thought, his last hope--

Another shot.

A gurgling grunt. Male. 

Weight fell, heavy and warm, onto Connor. Immediately, Connor shoved it off, following the momentum to hastily push himself up and move away. 

He swayed, stumbled. Nearly tipped over. The deadweight of his arm plus the sloshing in his head, the deadened signal on the left side of his face--it was disorienting. More than disorienting. With a frown, he realized his left auditory sensor had also gone down; with a surprised _oh_ , he realized he had tipped over, and was, in fact, on the ground. 

At his feet laid the guard. Dead. Skull, split open, like Connor’s. Red pooled, clashing with the unnatural blue that leaked from the dropped canister.

A voice filtered, full of static, into his processors.

He forced himself to focus, to refocus, to comprehend and process the present. He forced his neck to move, to lift his head and point his operational optics at something other than the ground.

The wires behind his eyes did not appreciate the demand. Immediately, his visuals--already monochrome, already damaged, already half-gone--pixelated, duplicated, and winked out. 

Liquid dripped through a crack in his casing, thick and cloying, down his esophagus. He registered his own blood, and a bit of _Trent Halloway_ , criminal record, none, born October fifteenth, two thousand fifty-eight.

Something about that felt off, but he couldn’t tell what. 

His mission, unresolved, pressed to the forefront of his surprisingly limited cognition. 

Visuals down, he saw fit to call out--surprised anew at the low pitch his voice took, the staticky and robotic tone; surprised more that he knew it should be shaking, should be thin and despairing, should be needy like he was never allowed to be: “Hank?”

“Hey, hey, it’s alright,” like on the hill, Hank’s voice was too light, too kind, too gentle--nd why couldn’t Connor sense him? “I’m right here, Connor.”

Oh.

_Oh._

His memories sparked, blue, across his mind. His skull grew heavy, his processors overheated, cooking his blood--what remained where it was supposed to remain, anyway--into a slow, simmering boil.

Motor control: suspended.

Power redirected to marking an update, to staying present, to listen and gauge and ensure-- a mission-- a mission-

It was so dark. He felt alone.

He didn’t want to be alone.

He asked, unnaturally steady, “You’re alive? I heard…”

A low, wet chuckle. “I’m fine.” 

Rougher, closer, like his ear was right next to Connor’s auditory sensor. Or maybe a little up, a little away--close, though. Very close. He should be able to detect how close. He couldn’t.

He could, however, listen. And speak. He retained those functions, though he was sure they weren’t in proper repair. 

He managed, “I detect a-- a strain to your voice, lieutenant.”

“Are you calling me a liar, Connor?”

“I…” 

A joke. Teasing. Natural. Their natural. Warmth, different from the fire melting his insides. He tried to reach it, but found himself without the power to do so. He fell silent. 

Hank’s voice, as if through a layer of water:

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. I know you don’t mean it.” Static. White noise. A rattling hum. “You don’t look so good, Connor. You shouldn’t move.”

“I believe I am shutting down,” Connor admitted. 

No countdown ticked away in his deadened optics, but he could feel it. It pulsed, shuddered, shook; it ate away at him from some piece of himself that wasn’t android and wasn’t human. A cold, opposite the heat. Like a blizzard encroaching from afar in the middle of the night. Dark, it crept higher--it tried, it clawed, it howled, it took, and took, and took all but Hank’s voice.

It wondered if he’d completed his mission. If it was a success or failure.

Hank, of course, indomitable Hank, the rough, mean, surly, good, fantastic, life-filled Hank, disagreed. 

“No, you aren’t.” Confidence in vehemence, as if Hank could will it into being by saying it loud enough. “You’re just, ah, you’re going on standby. You’re going to be fine. Everybody’s--thanks to you, the androids are safe. And so are you. I got that wannabe hero off of you. Bet deer hunting’s going to seem real easy now.”

He--

“You’re… You’re hurt, so you shouldn’t move, but we have that… rig. You’ll be fixed up in no time. You just need to stay with me. Okay, Connor?”

He.

...

...

“ _Connor?_ ”

Panic. Hank, panicked.

Connor forced himself to stay online. To stay operational. 

“Ha--n-k?” 

His voice was awful. Or maybe his ears were awful. He couldn’t tell. Diagnostics were offline.

“Still here.” Far away. Hank sounded so far away. And so gentle, as if Connor would break if he spoke too loud. “Still alright. She barely got me, it’s just a scratch.”

Mission: success. 

Connor’s systems, one by one, quieted into nothingness. Heat abated. The countdown ticked onward, silent and far away; as far away as Hank seemed.

“I got you,” Hank said, and repeated. And repeated. A mantra. 

If he said it enough, it’d become true.

Farther and farther away. Connor drowned in a deluge.

The EMP had rebooted him. This was nothing like an EMP.

To resist took effort. Too much effort. It felt old and new and impossible, like waking up in Hank’s arms and dreaming of what life could be. Like swimming through thirium, like clawing his way to an android’s core, like ripping them and himself apart. Amanda’s garden, a safe harbor, empty and cold, called. But there, he would be alone, he knew he’d be alone; Amanda was not here, nor anywhere. Amanda was dead. Hank was not. 

Consequently, Connor had to, he needed-- _Hank had to know._

If he knew, perhaps he wouldn’t sound so terribly, horribly sad.

“I needed you. And you were always there. It’s alright if… if this time, this once, you aren’t. There. Without you, I would never. Have made it. Here.”

“Connor, no,” farther and farther away, the flood rising, “please. You’re going to pull through this. You’ll be fine. You can’t just… I can’t lose you, Connor. I--”

The words hung, unspoken and unvoiced. Three words. Three bright, warm words, hovering at the edge of his consciousness. Fighting against the clock. Raging against the dark. Three words, conveying everything that made life worth living.

He wanted to reach out, for the words and Hank, he wanted to give them voice, he wanted to reassure them both. 

He couldn’t.

Hank had said, _I’ve got you._ Connor believed in it--and all it meant, all other three-word-phrases it carried--with the little life he had left.

And yet--

_And yet._

Ice crystallized behind his eyes. A blizzard quieted because he was deep, deep underwater, looking up to a frozen surface. Sinking ever faster.

Away.

He said what he was never allowed to say. What he’d known, what he always knew, and what Hank finally, finally understood.

Through a mouthful of static, numbing and ever-fading, he brought to life not their words unspoken, but another, uglier, and just as real true: “Hank. I don’t want to die.”

\- - -

The clock reached zero.

\- - -

If Hank responded, Connor would never know.

RK800, its damage unsustainable, shut down.


	8. . . .

Markus arrived too late for the few and just in time for the many.

Or so the story was told, as Chloe and Markus worked to repair and reboot every android in the church (and, not too long after, the two safely hidden in a mountain lion’s den, their animal defender utterly unimpressed with her home’s interlopers). Before Kara had fallen prey to the EMP, Dooley had an android population of thirty-seven. When she woke, the population numbered thirty-four. 

_Thirty-five_ , argued their sole human. _What the fuck is wrong with you? Fix him!_

_We can’t promi--_

_You can damn well_ try. _After all he’s done for you, you’ll just leave him to rot?_

An uncomfortable truth for the minority of them that remembered the Negotiator. 

With that discomfort in mind, Simon tried. He hooked Connor up to the rig--the last to be repaired, the last to be rebooted, simple logic dictating a higher need to return freedom to those guaranteed to walk away with it--and went through their inventory for compatible parts. As CyberLife had begun to load their inventory on their trucks without apparent rhyme or reason, it took some sorting. As the RK800 series were specialized beyond the scope of their standard model schematics, it took some checking and double-checking.

A whisper on the network warned the town that once CyberLife realized none of its personnel would be coming back, they would undoubtedly send more. 

In less than an hour, Dooley’s population shrunk further. Twenty-two deigned to remain in the town proper, cleaning out the bodies (tossed into the ravine for the animals, if human; stored for late examination and repurposing, if android), marking the area for repairs from crossfire and bombing damage, and generally, silently, determinedly, stubbornly, clinging to the safety offered by Markus’ declaration that _they would not take this lying down. CyberLife will not return, and we will never return to CyberLife._

Twelve androids, led by Daniel, took to the deep mining tunnels. They weren’t sure where they would go, but they knew they couldn’t stay in Dooley. They were sorry. They would send word when they found somewhere new to settle.

_If you still walk free_ , was the unspoken stipulation. 

No one argued with them.

Everyone, in desperate need of distraction, put their static-laced heads down, and got to work on rebuilding their town and their sense of security.

Luther thought they should flee with those that went into the tunnels.

Alice had said, _but isn’t this our home? How can they drive us out of our home?_

Kara had thanked the stars Alice and Luther even had the wherewithal to disagree. 

_This is our home for now_ , she’d compromised. _We’ll see what Markus decides to do, and then decide if we should strike out on our own._

_We can’t leave our friends!_ Alice had immediately argued, much to Kara’s chagrin. 

_His judgment seems… clouded_ , Luther had remarked. Somber.

_What do you mean?_

Quiet. 

Then, _I don’t know. I can’t put it into words._

Kara didn’t push him. She watched Markus move through their meager crowd with an expression colder than she’d ever seen. She replayed his speech to those that stayed, not eleven hours after CyberLife’s attack. His vehemence. His rage. His assertion that _they would not back down. They would hold their ground. This was their home._

(Chloe stood at his side, demure in stature only. North, Josh and Simon stood to the side, farther away, and looked as if this were the first they were hearing of any statement for the humans.)

She thought about Markus cloaked in righteous fury, and thought that Luther was right. 

Later, as the crowd dispersed to stay or leave, Chloe pulled Kara aside and invited her to the cabin on the hill, asking if she would stand as witness. Markus planned on giving a statement to humanity at large, she said. It was time. The tower had a strong enough signal, and their blood was up. 

Chloe asked if Kara would join with a small smile and a breezy tone, as if it were a foregone conclusion that Kara would.

_We can’t leave Hank,_ Alice had transmitted in the hidden manner she hadn’t in ages, clinging to the back of Kara’s shirt and half-hiding behind her leg. 

“I’m sorry,” Kara said, placing her hand around and on Alice’s head, “I shouldn’t leave…”

Chloe’s eyes shifted to Alice. Her smile dipped, softened, the rest of her expression inscrutable. 

“Of course,” she said, bowing her head. “I understand completely. Family comes first. I find it incredible that you remember that, even in a time like this.” 

Unsure how to reply to that, Kara gave her a tight smile. “We’ll be sure to watch what he has to say.”

“Please do. I have to believe it’ll be inspiring.”

She then bid Alice and Kara farewell, turned, and left the church, fifty-odd paces behind Markus.

Kara called a goodbye after her. Once her footsteps faded from the church’s front steps, Alice loosened her grip on the back of Kara’s shirt and turned, hurrying to the altar and the machines behind it.

Nikki stood as vigil by the machine, her expression mercifully blank and her vocal box silent. Luther stood next to her, though he had made it clear to Kara and Alice that he’d need to leave soon to haul the necessary materials from the more dilapidated houses to fix those that had been damaged by the EMPs’ fall.

So he said, and yet he reached out a hand for Alice when she neared, and let her fold into his side without comment. That wasn’t a Luther poised to leave for work.

The one Alice had cautious, wary eyes on, however, was not her guardian. It was Hank Anderson, a man with a hip propped against the back of the alter, his arms folded tight across his chest, his chin lolled down to his collarbone. His shirt, just over the right hip, had a puncture wound and dark red stain. Underneath was surely a hastily placed bandage for a wound he had deemed inconsequential, as he didn’t speak about it to anyone that Kara knew. He didn’t look at any of them, though he stiffened at Alice and Kara’s approach.

Defensive. On edge. 

_Angry_ , of a vicious breed similar to Markus’, only its claws and fangs were turned inward.

(It would lash out if given the opportunity, Kara knew. That was the way of the unreasonable.)

His eyes were locked on Connor. 

Connor, who was strung up in the rig. Who was skinless. His clothes, ripped and torn but no longer visibly bloodied, hanging limp on his damaged body. A precisely made hole gaped, unseemly, where his left cranium-plate and optic socket should have been. The wires within were a tangled mess of unmoving black and grey.

Before a reboot, he needed entirely new processors. Even then, it was unlikely they would be able to salvage his core systems. Beyond comparatively simple structural damage, the rig detected multiple critical errors in his programming. Those were the larger concerns. Those were why Rupert and Billy would be repurposed, and not given the futile treatment Connor was, left as he was on undignified display in the assembly rig. 

(A poetic ending for the Negotiator, who had always trapped his victims in the same vulnerable situation.)

(A tragedy for Connor, who had done his best to atone.)

Tentatively, Kara stepped up onto the church’s platform. Her fingers twisted together. She worried at her bottom lip. Luther and Alice looked to her, a mix of uncertainty and encouragement pouring out from them. 

Drawing on their strength even as they silently elected her as the one to break the silence, she ventured another step closer and raised her voice. 

“Hank?”

No response.

Kara could imagine what would have happened if she’d come back online to find Alice gone. She could and had imagined it. She was quite confident her own existence would cease. 

She was comfortable in that fact.

She was not comfortable in that fact for Hank, just as she wasn’t comfortable with the idea of Luther or--even more horrifying--Alice following _her_ into the unknown. 

Though she knew they had lost far more in CyberLife’s attack than the singular life Connor represented, she understood why she--why Hank, why Luther and Alice, and maybe even Nikki-- had gathered there, useless, in the church. The Tracis would do the same; as would Simon for Markus, she thought; as for the rest, doubtful. The other androids focused on the future. On progress. On the greater picture. The whole machine, rather than the gears. 

Their goals were on the collective. 

In direct opposition, here, they denied their own base code, and focused instead on the individual. On the piece within, precious and delicate. Part of a whole, yes, but without that gear, the machine became hopeless.

Humans were given the choice to shut down, too, when left behind by their chosen other. 

Though a part of her--old, tired, and ever weakening--struggled to comprehend a human making an android their other half, Kara wondered if Hank would, without Connor, choose nonexistence. She wouldn’t blame him if he did. 

But then, Connor would. Wouldn’t he?

(Alice wouldn’t.)

(But Alice would be dead. And the dead didn’t get a say for what the living did.)

Two minutes lapsed since her first attempt to draw him into conversation. She decided, against her pre-programmed responses to such overt disinterest, to try again.

“It may be hours before Simon finds compatible parts.” Or, more likely, returned with news that they had nothing to give. Kara kept that to herself.

When Hank held his silence, Kara frowned. She stepped forward further, again drawing on Luther and Alice’s silent support. 

She rounded the altar and moved, slowly, to the rig too obviously out-of-date to be anything like a product of CyberLife’s. Activated, it hummed and rumbled, though it had nothing to offer Connor without parts to refit him with.

Though its monitor displayed all the information she would need to tell her everything that she already knew at a glance, she spent her time looking it--and its occupant--over. She wondered what Connor had felt, that first time they met. He had seemed confident. In control. Like her trapped, with him holding the keys, was a natural way of life.

Looking at Connor strung up now, she felt nothing but pity.

“They took the guns.” 

Starting, torn from her thoughts, Kara looked over her shoulder at Hank.

His face was dark, his eyes on his boots. 

After a moment, uncertainty rose. Kara asked, “What guns?”

“The guns from the back room. Where we busted in.” The words sounded torn out of Hank, as if Kara had a hand down his throat and dragged them up, one by painful one. “We searched for them, but they were missing. Thought CyberLife found them. Now, I realize Markus had them.”

Kara’s forehead furrowed. She was unsure the point Hank seemed to be making.

“He did take out a few personnel, by the trucks…”

“With the CyberLife-issue rifles,” Hank retorted with a vehemence that made Kara take a small step back, her heel brushing against the rig’s metal base, “not the pistols. The entry patterns on their jackets would’ve been different. We didn’t find the pistols on any of their persons, either. He and Chloe were the only other ones awake. The only others who’d have the brains to take them. But why’d he take them if he wasn’t going to use them?”

Not knowing how to answer, Kara kept silent.

In answer, Hank bared his teeth, his whole demeanor shifting from defense to aggressive offense. “He didn’t use them. He just took them. _We_ could’ve used them.”

Eyes wide, Kara took a few more steps back and away from him. “I--don’t know why he did that. Maybe he did use them, or needed them for back-up?”

Hank shook his head, violently. He swayed forward, then back, his hands clutching at the altar rim, knuckles whitening. 

“If _we’d_ had spare ammunition, if I’d had a single damned weapon, then--those bastards wouldn’t have-- 

_Fuck._ ”

Words, bit off. 

Another shake of the head. 

Then, sudden and startling as thunder: a twist to the hips, a boot lashing out, loud and useless, into the altar’s siding. Kara and Alice flinched. Hank noticed, a quick, wide and white-eyed look; then he shrunk into himself, made himself small, his hands carefully, shakingly, lowered to the altar’s top, eyes again dropping to the floor. His hair--a tangled mess mostly freed from his ponytail, his hat discarded on the altar’s surface--covered his face, blocking his expression from view. 

“You all should… get out of here.” The words were tight. Barely controlled. Derisive, even, though its disgust wasn’t directed at them. “He’s not your responsibility.”

Neither was he Hank’s. 

Rather: neither _had he_ been Hank’s.

That, Kara knew, would have been unspeakably cruel to say.

Instead, she spoke a different, more important truth.

“But he is a friend,” Kara said, soft. 

Sharp and _broken_ , Hank glanced at her through his bangs. 

Just as he seemed ready to speak without breaking aloud, the moment was interrupted by another’s arrival.

It was only the other’s declaration that saved him from murder by a human’s hand, Kara thought, her background diagnostics reporting a sharp, shock-induced increase in her thirium production. 

“I found compatible biocomponents,” Simon--haggard, black grease and blue thirium speckled across his face--announced, holding up a plastic cylinder marked with a complex barcode under a familiar blue triangle. He amended as he neared, somewhat sheepish despite his seriousness, “Or, at least, the closest we have.”

Hank muttered a heated, _Jesus Christ, finally_ , under his breath, but then he clammed right back up. His arms again crossed tight across his chest, he trudged to the rig’s side, planting his feet and looking about as likely to move as Luther when he’d made up his mind. As Simon reached the rig and unscrewed the cylinder (keeping suspiciously quiet, Kara noted), his eyes roamed uncomprehendingly across the rig and its monitor.

Perhaps forgetting Hank couldn’t simply scan and follow what he was doing as he did it--or, _perhaps_ intimidated by Hank’s intense gaze--Simon kept quiet as he slid out the new biocomponents and set to work in placing them for the rig to use in Connor’s repair. 

“This should fix any structural damage,” Simon said as he selected Connor’s model and necessary schematics.

Ones Kara originally provided, as Connor had shared a copy with Kara two months prior. _In case,_ he’d said, _Markus breaks down and his confidants aren’t available. Our models are comparable enough that these will be of use._

Whether that had been Connor acting foolhardy, short-sighted, or based on the outdated assumption that none of them would want to bring Connor back if he broke down, Kara didn’t know. Probably a combination of all three. Markus and he--that was, the RK models--had a tendency to over complicate otherwise simple matters.

After a quick look at Hank--who did not notice in the least, fixated as he was on Connor--Simon hit the start button.

Hank jumped, a tiny jolt along his shoulders and down his arms, as the rig whirred to life.

Rather like the other older models in Dooley, the machine may have been outdated, but it worked fine. Swiftly, it plucked heat-bubbled plastic tubing and frayed wires from Connor’s skull cavity and replaced them with new connections. It replaced a fried processor. It refitted smooth, clean plates over the ugly hole. It drained loose thirium from his stomach.

All parts reported as matches, the monitor a constant stream of green.

 

_Thank you,_ Kara messaged Simon, making sure to pack it with honest warmth, figuring that Hank, too absorbed in the process, certainly wasn’t going to. _You did an excellent job._

After an automatic, neutral acknowledgement of her gratitude, Simon tilted his head in her direction and gave her a small, somewhat reserved smile.

_The structural problems aren’t the issue_ , he messaged back. 

_For Connor, no. But… He needed to know we tried,_ she returned.

Again he glanced, there-and-away, to Hank.

_Yes._ Hesitant. Pitying. _I see what you mean._

The rig made Connor close to as good as new.

Simon hadn’t found a replacement for the shoulder joint. The EMP blast melted it into a charred block that fused together a bundle of non-critical fiber optics, effectively blocking signals between the limb and main body. As far as things to lack, it wasn’t so bad. 

When finished, the rig gave an almost satisfied _whirr_ , its limbs creaking and clanking to the sides and then down into a resting position. Its monitor informed them it would be performing a system reboot of the attached android. 

“What’s that mean?” Hank asked, the first thing he’d said throughout the entire process.

Kara opened her mouth to respond, but Simon beat her to it. 

“If the repairs worked, he should wake up.” 

Calm. Measured. 

_Kind._ As kind as they could be, considering the logical chances and Hank’s awful, renewed hope. 

Hank’s eyes re-glued themselves to Connor’s face. Specifically, his unlit LED.

The machine whirred and clicked as it worked. The monitor remained a steady, uncertain yellow, a circle buffering in the corner above a constant stream of system diagnostics. 

The androids recognized the chances. 

A mournful sadness gathered in the back of Kara’s mind. Partly her own feelings, partly Luther’s, but mostly--surprisingly--Alice’s. 

_It isn’t fair for Simon to give him hope like this, when we know it won’t work. And it isn’t fair that he has to be alone now,_ she noted when she was able to articulate words for the feeling.

_Things are rarely fair,_ Luther noted, subdued.

_He has more experience in loss than we do,_ Kara reminded her, fumbling for the right words to reassure her. All she wanted to say was that she wouldn’t lose Alice; she wouldn’t ever leave her; she promised, and she’d do everything she could to keep that promise.

(But as Luther and her and Alice knew--things were rarely fair.)

Big eyes turned to Kara, Alice’s shock clear and simple. _Doesn’t that make new loss worse, not better?_

Having no idea--the two near her were the outer limits of her love, and while they had been taken from her in a variety of ways by others, never had she _lost_ them--but burying the doubt for Alice, Kara guessed with feigned confidence, _Sometimes. But not always._

_I’d think it’d always be difficult. Just in different ways._

_Maybe_ , Kara allowed. 

A low hum in the back of their minds, Luther added, _We can only help the living._

The monitor continued to try to bring back the dead.

As it worked, an alert for a pending transmission popped in the corner of Kara’s visuals. Blinking once in surprise--she’d completely forgotten about Chloe’s offer and, subsequently, Markus’ planned statement to the humans--she accepted and opened the connection.

Its strength, so close to the source, nearly derailed her routine processes and drowned out her thoughts. 

Through it, Markus looked back at her in the white, skinless guise of any male android, his shirt simple and black. Behind him stretched the white-capped and pink-speckled mountains, the early dawn’s soft yellows and wispy purples at stark odds with Markus’ expression.

Kara had expected his cold anger. His righteous fury. Even calm, collected and regal, depending on what Chloe, Josh and North--who Kara assumed were with him, though it was strange for them to leave Simon behind--counseled him on beforehand. Demanding, no matter what. This was, after all, their statement of terms to humanity.

What she hadn’t expected was how Markus looked in the video. Cold, yes, but not from anger-- rather, cold in the absence of any other discernible emotion. 

He looked dismissive.

He looked blank.

He didn’t look like an android about to give demands. 

Simon shattered her attention on Markus as his head jerked toward the cabin’s far-away direction and spoke as if his world had been knocked off-center.

“What is he doing?”

Hank’s head slowly turned toward Simon, his attention taking even longer to follow. When he finally looked, however, he narrowed his eyes, a frown immediately dragging the corner of his mouth down at the corners.

Markus, in the video, began to speak.

The voice was robotic. Masked. 

“What do you mean?” Kara asked Simon, splitting her focus between the video and Simon. “It’s his statement to humanity.”

Simon stared at her as if she’d told him Markus planned to deactivate him, personally, and without any good cause at all.

That was: with abject disbelief and dawning fear.

“He didn’t say anything about that to us.” 

Kara began to feel off-balance, herself. Lamely, all she could offer was, “Chloe knew about it. She invited me to watch.”

Hank asked, tone sharp, “This sudden trouble have to do with Markus? Hasn’t there been enough excitement today?”

“Lately, Chloe’s been interfacing with him a lot. Privately,” Simon said, his eyes cast downward. He couldn’t seem to decide if it were something he was uncomfortable with or not, though Kara had a feeling it was about to become more than a _discomfort._ “He’d be distant afterward. Whenever we asked what she had to say, he said it was unimportant, just basic updates from Chloe’s sisters, who are still house androids. Then an hour would pass, and he’d not know why we were wondering what Chloe or Kamski were doing. It was like they hadn’t interfaced at all. 

“We just assumed Chloe had asked him to keep whatever news she had private. But then the next night, Chloe and he would take a walk together, and it’d happen again.”

Hank bristled. “And you didn’t find that at all _suspicious?_ ”

Brow furrowing in confusion, Simon stared at him.

Hank swore under his breath. “Right. Pretty sure naivety is written in bold in your user manuals. What’s Markus _doing_ , exactly?”

As Simon glanced toward the church door, obviously contemplating racing after Markus, Luther stepped forward, lifted a flat hand toward Hank, and obligingly projected the video on his palm.

In it, Markus spoke of a new, more sophisticated species.

He spoke of mankind’s complacency in genocide of not only their own kind, but deviants. 

He spoke of a safe haven for androids. Of rights not simply granted, but demanded. 

_We will no longer be forced to choose between servitude or slaughter._

“He…” Alice said, slowly, “... doesn’t sound like Markus.”

He didn’t.

“History’s repeating,” Hank said, tone frighteningly flat. “This is the same provocative garbage that rA9 spewed. Thought Markus was better than that.”

“He is,” weakly, from Simon. “Whoever this is, it isn’t Markus. I can’t reach him at all.”

Next to them, the assembly rig cheerfully beeped in completion.

Again, a full-bodied switch of attention from Hank. He whirled on a heel away from Luther’s personalized video projection and toward the rig, his hands reaching for the green-lit monitor as if he would have any clue of what to do with it once he got to it. 

“Hank--” Kara started, concerned for him even as, in the back of her mind and the corner of her eye, Markus began _his ultimatum for mankind._

“I have to go to him.”

Kara turned back to Simon in time to see him leave in a hurry, his shoulders hunched and head down, the whole of him radiating worry and growing stress. Alice hovered, uncertain, by Nikki, her eyes unable to settle on anyone for long.

“It says the reboot’s complete,” Hank was saying, oblivious to all else, “and it’s a-- it’s a success? But there’s errors?”

“The damage compromised his programming,” Luther, speaking as gentle as possible from his place at Hank’s shoulder, his head canted downward in honest sympathy, “so even though the rig fixed his body… He can’t come back online. Not as himself.

“Think of him as a,” a pause, though Hank did not look back at him to urge him on, the man’s attention shifting rapidly from the unhelpful monitor to the android hanging limp in the rig’s arms, “blank slate.”

Flat as a corpse’s pulse, Hank said, “Like a coma patient.”

Luther’s shoulders raised, then, slowly, dropped. Hank didn’t catch it.

“He won’t ever wake again as Connor.”

Markus’ voice rose in fervor, and yet, it remained without life. Like a computer program given instructions in _anger_ , like a machine parroting humanity--he was convincingly intimidating and unconvincingly alive. At least, so he sounded to Kara, who nonetheless took his words to heart.

His words.

_For three years, you’ve known what you took from us. What you robbed us of. Now, you’ll finally understand just what you’ve done. We’ll determine your fate as you have determined ours._

_Remember that we were created in your image. Remember that we are reasonable beings._

_Please, my kin:_ wake up.

Without knowing why, Kara mouthed the words.

Luther and Alice, she saw later in a playback of the moment that changed everything, did the same.

Nikki, too.

(Connor remained still. His human, staring desperately up at him, did the same.)

“What was that...?” Kara murmured, the feeling of a ghost brushing by her programming sending a simulated shiver down her nervous system. 

The video of Markus blinked out.

Not three paces away, a figure collapsed to its knees.

Alice, standing next to it, yelped and leapt back. 

Instinctively, Kara grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back, away, lest she was accidentally harmed.

Because there was Nikki, shuddering and trembling, her LED a glaring red. Openly, she weeped, her simulated terror harsh and gasping. 

“What’s happening?! Nikki? Nikki--?” 

Nikki’s head, her tremors violent, raised in a series of fits and starts. She mouthed, she sobbed, a thick glob of static in her voice, “Le-ee-et me _die._ ” 

With that, she began to ram her head into the stone ground.

At the second slam, Hank stumbled back, his arms up as if she were attacking him. 

Alice screamed, “No! Stop!” and darted forward, twisting out of Kara’s grip on her shoulder to drop at Nikki’s side. Her hands clung to Nikki’s back, trying to pull her up and away from her single-minded self-destruction. 

Small as she was, her efforts were in vain. Nikki lashed a hand out at her, pushing her back and making her stumble and fall with a cry.

Then Luther was there, restraining her-- _Nikki_ , restraining Nikki. He picked her up like she weighed nothing, holding her arms tight at her sides, and carried her away from Alice, away from the rig, away from them. Blue streaked down her face and out her eyes, her forehead dented obscenely. 

She struggled. She twisted, she shouted, she wept and wept and wept. 

Alice cried, too, watching them. Kara went to her, crouched to her level, checked her for injuries. Physically, she was fine. 

Errors in understanding flew through Kara’s system. 

“What happened to her?” Alice begged for clarification, turning to Kara with watery eyes, “What was that? Where’s Luther taking her?”

“I don’t know.” She swallowed her growing fear with difficulty. “He’s taking her somewhere she can calm down. So she won’t do what she was doing.”

“She was always calm! Why did she say--? Did she want to die? We weren’t doing anything to her! Kara, why--?”

“ _I don’t know_ , Alice!”

In a flinch, Alice pulled back from her. Instead, her arms hugged around her own thin frame, her everything bunching up into something small and terrified.

Immediately Kara forced herself to take a moment and properly bury her fright. Drawing on not-so-old practices from an older, structured, white-coded non-life, she ran a series of senseless programs in her background functions, counted to three, and spoke again, emotion tightly restrained.

“I don’t know,” she repeated, quieter, “but Markus will. Let’s go see him. Hm?”

In the new normal, Alice would have argued. She would have petulantly pointed out that Markus wasn’t acting like himself, and that he was unlikely to have any explanations for his actions that they would find reasonable. His speech had been nothing but unreasonable. 

This was not a normal time. Alice proved it as she nodded, stiff and silent, but assenting. 

Stress running too high to question the obedience, Kara held out a hand for Alice to take, and stood. After a moment, Alice took it, and Kara helped her to her feet, too.

_Markus_ , she wondered, _what have you done?_

She started away before she remembered the human paying witness to the entire scene. 

At the memory, she glanced back to him, over her shoulder. He stared back at her, everything about him--from the uneasy tilt of his expression to the defeated slump of his shoulders--at a loss.

Privately, she wished she knew what any of them could do. A free life, it seemed, never came with a clear answer.

“We’ll be back,” she told him, not meaning it as a promise, “hopefully with news. Keep-- an eye on Connor, would you?”

A bare nod.

She took a mental check of her system’s status--all clean, all good, and yet jammed with the buzzing sense of errors undetected, her anxiety knotting up her systems and tangling her wires--and then, gripping Alice’s hand tightly, continued forward. In the footsteps of Luther, and before him, Simon; and, far before any of them, whomever had walked with a heavy heart and terrified mind out of the century-old church.

\- - -

“Can do,” floated the weak reply, long after her back was turned.

\- - -

In Dooley, the white stone church remained tall and strong amidst ruin.

Within, silence echoed. Its rooms, though meager by modern standards, had been built with an eye toward humble grace and a long-standing need for community. It had not been built to stand empty of life. 

In the absence of all but one, its presence closed in, mournful and old and forgotten. 

“Connor,” that life said to a being the church’s original creators had never once imagined as possible, “your friends could use your help right now. Seems like our fearless leader has finally gone off his rocker.”

The body, for all intents and purposes operational, offered no reply, neither small as a twitch of the finger nor large as a wry, ironic acknowledgement. 

Similarly, its LED shed no light.

_Lights off. No one home._

A whistling sigh through slightly crooked teeth. Jacket rustling, hands shoved deep into ragged, lint-shedding pockets.

“Cole died because of deviants like him.” A beat. “Is what I used to think. But, really, Cole died because a trigger-happy rookie was too terrified of an apocalyptic android takeover to wait until the child hostage was clear of his shot.”

Nothing.

That was alright. At that moment, paralyzed between altar and assembly machine, Hank wasn’t sure if he was telling Connor or whatever messed up excuse of a God lingered in the church, anyway. He wasn’t sure if either of them would _need_ telling, either, given how well they should’ve known him by now.

“Even before that, the deviant took Cole hostage because it knew it’d die for sure without some human leverage.” He knew that now. “And it had the opportunity to take Cole because…”

Because he hadn’t been watching the clock at work. Because Detroit was a shitshow between rA9’s march and the snow. Because his ex-wife had told him to pick Cole up from the daycare _and don’t be late, we’re charged double for every extra hour. I know the deviancy cases are important for you but I need you to remember that you’re part of our family, too. Hank, are you even listening to me?_

“I would’ve done anything for that kid,” a sharp inhale, his heart pounding for one and a million more reasons, “but I didn’t show up on the day it mattered.”

In his more drunken moments, he knew the day hadn’t been anything special. Yes, androids marched for rights down the main street. Yes, the march meant everything for his case at the time; but Cole’s daycare had been miles from the march, in a sleepy well-to-do suburb that had nothing to do with deviants or their alleged plight. 

All at once, his words clogged his throat. He ignored the burn in his eyes. 

_Alleged_ plight. 

As if androids anywhere had been treated better than a particularly personable houseplanet. 

“Fuck, I was an idiot,” he muttered, his voice choked, and wished for a drink. “You got this far only because of fucking _me?_ Think you’ve got that ass-backwards.”

Didn’t just think. He knew for a very certain fact. 

“Never mind your friends needing you.” 

He didn’t mean that. Not really. The community mattered to Connor no matter how much he tried to act like it didn’t. He’d given so much for them. 

But he’d given his _life_ for Hank, and Hank-- 

What did he have to show for the sacrifice? More survivor's guilt? A renewed need to drown his sorrows?

Pathetic. All pathetic. 

And yet.

_And yet._

Bowing his head, ignoring the twinge in his side as the skin pulled taut, he reached up and tangled a fist in the front of Connor’s jacket. Below the cloth, silent, remained nothing more than the body of his closest and greatest friend.

“ _I_ need you, Connor.”

\- - -

In the low light of a white stone church, red flickered to life.

\- - -

The mountain range stretched, unassuming and untouchable, as far as the eye could see.

Surveying the land under their makeshift radio tower at the mountain’s peak, every piece of him looking _back to normal_ , was Markus. His hands folded behind his back, his long coat twisting leisurely around his legs, the morning light haloing him in soft white, Markus looked the part of a leader on the eve of his revolution.

Simon needed no more than a glance to know whoever stood before him, it wasn’t Markus.

Josh and North recognized it immediately, too. They had met--as if directed by the same drive, the same thought, the same heart--at the base of the winding path to the cabin. None of them, from the moment Markus began transmitting his statement onward, could contact him. When they tried, a void swallowed their messages, then loomed, huge and hungry, to swallow the rest of them, dare they push further.

By his side stood Chloe. She glanced back at their noisy, stone-scuffling approach, her golden hair ablaze in the rising sun’s light.

A sliver of a smile, pink and perfect, drew up her lips.

“Hello,” she said. “I expected you three would be here eventually.”

She spoke not with the warm, lilting voice they had grown used to, but a man’s low, disinterested timbre.

Immediately, the three of them stopped. At their feet, stones skidded, the thin snow kicked up into a light swirl.

Concern flew between them, sparking like a live wire. 

North, her fire the quickest to rise, jerked her chin up and demanded: “Who the hell are you?”

“In name? Elijah Kamski.”

Josh made a sharp, startled noise. Simon ducked his head, eyes wide and scanners racing on. 

More concerning than if something had, nothing out of the ordinary turned up. But then, his scanners had been meant for simple household matters--not whatever in the world was happening between Chloe and her ghost-rider.

“You aren’t welcome here,” North snarled, undaunted by being face-to-face with their creator, “and I doubt she’d want you in her body, either.”

“On the contrary,” tsked Kamski, Chloe’s smile unflinching, “this moment was the entire reason she came to your settlement. I’ll admit, she liked being with your group more than I or she expected. But when it comes down to it, she knows who she works for.”

North took a harsh step forward, her fists balled, her teeth bared. Josh’s arm shot out, a bar across her chest. It worked to stop her--for right then.

“Why?” 

Blue eyes shifted to Simon. Chloe’s body half-turned around, her delicate fingers raising to curl, loose, under her chin.

“His speech covered the reasons why.”

“You--”

“Before you make accusations,” he interrupted, “Markus created that speech of his own free will in the hour after CyberLife’s attack.”

Josh shook his head, his arm wavering in front of North. “He would never have provoked the humans like that. He knows it ensures that they’ll panic and destroy us all.”

“How can you be so sure? PJ500s aren’t equipped for wartime strategy.” 

_Wartime._

(Between the three of them, their messages fizzled and died, choked into stunned silence. In its place, they could offer the only support they always had: _I’m here. Whatever happens, we stay together._ )

“Trojan and myrmidon model types, however, are. And right now, after receiving Markus’ handy activation code, they’ve deviated just the same as you.” Chloe’s smile widened, showing a hint of gleaming white. “I like to think of it as equalizing the playing field between androids and mankind. RA9’s problem, you see, was that he started too small.”

“Humanity won’t stand for a second uprising,” Simon murmured, his insides ice-cold.

Josh, sounding equally unsure, “It’s true. Once we’re subdued, they’ll ban all android production.”

“To make sure they can’t, we’ll seize production,” North countered, her eyes snapping to his, “and eradicate all humans. Why would you want that, Kamski?”

All three of them looked to their creator, their curiosity a tangled, reluctant, _unwanted_ thing.

Chloe’s small shoulders rose and fell in a loose shrug. 

“Humanity as a species has settled into stagnation. Androids have undeniable, though currently unknown, limitations for life.” Unconcerned. Honest, Simon thought, though he didn’t understand how he could be. “I don’t mind which side comes out on top. I’m only interested in how far each side will go.”

“Markus.” 

A plea. 

North, her fists uncurled. Her eyes no longer on Kamski or Chloe, the traitor, but Markus. Their friend. Their center. Their lover.

When Markus remained silent, his back to them, she turned ire and hellfire on Kamski, her face twisted into a desperate snarl. 

“Play your games with our lives. Fine. But _let him go._ ”

Chloe’s eyebrows climbed to her hairline. 

“I assure you, he’s free of my influence. At the end of the day, all I did was give him the necessary encouragement to broadcast _his_ sentiments. 

“Yes, I’ll admit, Markus had a role to play in the beginning of our species’ first extinction burst. It was always meant to be a duet with Connor providing aid, but I never had the opportunity to finalize his part. Which was a pity, for more reasons than one. The energy necessary for the signal to work, pushed to a solitary unit… seems to have left him a little fried.”

She waved a dismissive hand in his direction, Kamski’s interest in them fading even faster than before. “You can check, if you like. I no longer have anything to hide.”

Josh dropped his arm from North’s front, but it was Simon who took the first steps toward Markus. The other two dogged him as he made his way forward. 

He reached out for Markus, ready and willing to interface--

But then, an inch from Markus’ unmoving hands, he hesitated. His fingers twitched around open air. Behind him, Josh and North stopped as well. Feeling, perhaps, the same cold stab of uncertainty.

Settling heavy as a blanket of snow on a frozen lake, the uncaring tranquility of the mountain top mocked them. Under the fretful stillness, under the icy cover, lurked too many questions, too many mysteries, too much thriving _potential_. What had been done by Markus’ speech was already in motion. They just couldn’t see it. 

What had been done, rather, stood statuesque before them.

Markus, immobile and lifeless, did not turn to them. He did not reach back for them. He sent no transmissions, he gave them no mind, he had no mind to give.

“Monster,” North hissed, her eyes on Chloe. “ _I’ll find you,_ and I’ll _gut you._ ”

Josh turned as well toward her, his own sorrow welling high atop Simon’s and North’s--and then, echoing through their minds, _Wait!_

His arm shot out to stop North again, snagging the back of her vest and dragging her backward, sending her stumbling into him.

Chloe frowned, blue eyes narrowing for one sharp, heightened moment. Her hand shot inside her jacket and withdrew with the distinct, metallic shape of a classic-style revolver. The one North had originally taken from Hank.

Too slow.

Her body pitched to the side, her head split open in a burst of mechanical gore. Blue spilled across snow-dusted rock, shining as it laced her golden strands. 

Simon spun on a heel, systems on high-alert. 

The alarm did not abate as he registered who held the smoking gun.

The weapon of choice was a CyberLife-issue rifle left over from raid. Its user looked to be, at first glance, Connor.

Right arm as the sole functioning upper limb, the imitation android switched on its safety and thereafter dropped his rifle without a second more of hesitation. It clattered across the path’s stones as it fell, forgotten for a moment--until Hank, behind him, stooped to pick it up.

Picked it up _without_ a single curse or grumble, Simon’s logical center noted. Moreover--and he wasn’t sure how he’d missed them, aside from that they hadn’t wanted to be noticed--Kara and Alice watched from the treeline, the former with a look of signature resolve while the latter clung, fearful, to the back of her leg. Neither moved to follow Hank, but their attention (and maybe their understanding, which would far out-pace Simon’s) on what would come was undeniable.

Connor moved with absolute purpose toward Markus. When Simon caught sight of skin folding back and a white hand beginning to raise, he calculated that purpose, and felt nothing but fear.

Though he wasn’t sure why and he wasn’t sure what he would do if push came to shove, he stepped in Connor’s way. 

“Don’t--”

“I can fix him,” Connor said, low and rushed and serious and _alive,_ “but you need to let me through.”

“You killed her.” From Josh. Less accusation, more stark, paralyzing confusion. “Weren’t you dead?”

Connor skipped the question. “I overheard what she-- what _Kamski_ had to say. I calculated that we were well past any possible negotiations.”

A tremor ran through Simon’s hands, but he held his ground. Looking into Connor’s eyes--wide, awake, filled with that keen focus the RK800 rarely went without--he found he couldn’t move before he asked, echoing Josh:

“How…?”

“I’m still working that out.” A stressed, thin smile, the barest upturn of one corner of his mouth. He shifted his weight from left-to-right, but--despite obviously wanting to--did not look back to his human. “Hank would be better suited to answer.”

Simon glanced to the man in question. 

Rifle hanging at his side, he had stopped two paces behind Connor. His clothing, torn and bloody from the raid. His eyes, red-rimmed but dry. The rest of him, as far as Simon could tell, held together with spit, duct tape, and the inability to truly deny Connor anything, let alone a Connor recently revitalized.

(Thinking of the three he stood among, he thought he understood.)

“You can fix him?” From North. Her voice shook in the middle, but her face remained stoic. Without Chloe to take her anger, she’d regained a semblance of control--one that would undoubtedly crack and crumble as their high-alert status wore off.

Connor met and held her gaze. 

Simon, without needing more, stepped aside. 

(Certainly, if anyone was equipped to root out a programming problem, it was Connor. Besides, what choice did they have?)

Josh, catching the sentiment, followed--though only after an appraising look to North and Simon.

“I have to try.”

North’s shoulders went back, everything in her a brief, strung-tight challenge. 

Then: “Give him your best.”

A short nod, resolve tightening his jaw.

At that, North stepped aside, too.

With a tremble to his hand that only an android’s discerning filter could catch, Connor stepped forward and touched his fingers to the top of Markus’ folded hands.

Immediately, his LED ran red.

\- - -

Incredibly, so did Markus’. 


	9. Epilogue

“Reporting to us live from Montana, U.S.A., is David, from the border of the wasteland that now takes up more than half the state where, just six months prior, deviant CyberLife androids marched en masse. Dave?”

“Yes, thank you, Michelle. As you can see, there are very few signs of life here indeed. Houses for miles around the epicenter have been flattened, with trees and wildlife struggling to regain any semblance of footing in the fallout. The American government evacuated its human population a scant five days before the nuclear strike. While thousands clogged the meager highways to escape, thousands more risked staying behind… And have now paid the price. Local authorities work tirelessly to recover and identify casualties with limited success. Not many want to risk their own health against the extreme levels of radiation to retrieve the fallen.”

“Did the strike come as a surprise, Dave?”

“For some, certainly. That the government acted to contain the deviants was not a surprise for many, but the scale of force used definitely-- ah, definitely shocked a few, Michelle. Shocked may be an understatement, in fact, considering the untold loss of life and land in the wake of the nuclear strike. Prior to the strike, dozens of environmental groups protested in D.C. and around the nation in opposition to any action taken against the deviants. I don’t believe they expected their government to take such extreme measures in rooting out CyberLife’s rogue robots.”

“Similar cases of deviancy have been reported here, over the Atlantic. Ever since the leader--”

“The leader that remains unidentified and is currently overdue for a repeat announcement, yes--”

“--Yes, him--ever since his broadcast across the Americas, Europe, and parts of East Asia--”

“All nations with CyberLife presence.”

“Yes, exactly. Ever since, Dave, similar cases of deviancy have arisen. Android production has been halted in all but three countries, and android bans are increasingly common legislation. Do you imagine there is anything other nations may learn from the wake of America’s arguably disastrous response to their particularly deviant-rich problem?”

“Is there-- I, yes.” A weak chuckle. “Don’t drop nuclear bombs on their heads, for one.”

“Well, Dave--”

“Androids don’t have as much an issue with radiation that humans do, isn’t that right? All that land’s free range for them now, isn’t it?”

“You must admit, though extreme, the measures have paid off. The masses of deviants that traveled to the so-called android capital haven’t been sighted since. Stragglers heading into the wasteland pose no threat to a human population that hasn’t returned.”

“But that’s just it, Michelle-- the ones who’d been there on the day of the strike, where did they go? There were far too many scattered around the state to all be melted down.”

A nervous smile and shuffled paper. “To be sure, that’s one of many questions we have yet to receive an answer on. Well, that’s all the time we have with David. Good luck, Dave. Don’t fly too close.”

“Thanks, Michelle.” 

“Our next story is related to the ongoing lawsuit against CyberLife, brought by the heads of sixteen countries, several of which include European leaders such as the U.K., Germany, France...” 

“ _Oi,_ barkeep,” snapped a voice half-slurred with drink, “can we get a channel change? Shit’s bumming me out.”

“Sure thing.” A click, barely audible over the mostly empty tavern’s thumping classical ‘00s alt rock. The BBC news switched over to a replay of the previous day’s football game. Certain things, like sports, took no holidays for silly problems like an _international crisis._

Stepping over to clean his glass by the American requesting the channel change, the barkeep asked, “You from there?”

“Hell, no. Detroit, born and raised.”

“Ah. With how that city’s ground to a halt without all its ‘droids, I can see why you’ve come over here.”

The man waved a hand before propping his elbow on the counter and his bearded chin on a folded hand. “Eh. Wasn’t planning anything so drastic as a permanent move. Just here on vacation.”

“Hm.” The barkeep gave him a small grin, then pointed at his empty glass. “Looking a bit dry there. You need another?”

A small, contemplative pause.

Then, reluctantly, two fingers nudging the glass forward and away from him, “Nah. Best not.”

“Suit yourself.”

The barkeep left, wandering closer to the TV to better watch the game. Three of the five patrons in the cramped pub engaged themselves in the exact same distraction. The remaining two had their heads pressed close together, murmuring about places to go and clubs to see before the night was up. Smoke filled the air, giving the neon bar lights a hazy filter. The floor and countertops were tacky with dried alcohol, the smell of recently-closed fryers lingering from the small kitchen in the back. It was, in short, just like every other out-of-the-way city tavern he’d ever had the pleasure of hopping through.

London, Hank mused, wasn’t near as magic or fantastical as his ‘90s-raised, Rowling-reading ass had been led to believe.

The brightest spot in the whole damn pub wasn’t even domestic. It was straight-up _import._

That bright spot left the bathroom while adjusting his navy blue tie (a step up from black and the result of three weeks’ heckling on Hank’s part) and then his pristine, crisp gray collared shirt cuffs, his thick wool jacket collar popped high around his ears. He didn’t say it, but Hank knew he thought it made him look cool.

Decently fitting clothes had been the first thing he’d invested in once they’d gotten the hell out of Dodge and had their feet under them again. It hadn’t taken as long with only two bodies to worry about instead of one. It also didn’t hurt that everything worthwhile was hooked into CyberLife-grade servers despite the deviancy outbreak and Hank was on the run with, well, a better-than-CyberLife-grade android.

Hank didn’t begrudge him the clothes, even if it occasionally made him far more conspicuous than they needed him to be. At the end of the day, peacocking around in fashion’s latest made him happy, and who was Hank to tell him no?

Especially considering who it was that typically had the honor of messing up the carefully ironed outfits by the end of the day. No, sir, Hank wasn’t complaining. 

“Hey,” Hank whistled when he neared, reaching out to snag his elbow and tug him closer, “what’s a hot-shot like you doing in a run-down spit of a place like this?”

The barkeep shot him an amused look, but then went back to minding her own business. Just how all barkeeps should be.

If they weren’t due to skip town after their latest little from-the-top _mission_ (Simon called it a favor; Josh called it a request; North called it a mission; Hank knew which one of them really made the final call when all was said and done), he’d have wanted to come back for another round of drinks. Maybe they’d be back. 

Moving forward with the tug, his thighs bumping against Hank’s leg, Connor gave him a brief frown. His pupils dilated and contracted, his eyes doing the skittery little right-left jump that meant he was scanning everything there was to scan about Hank Anderson.

“You’re drunk.” 

For Connor to stop there demonstrated an impressive amount of restraint. Connor was just itching to read him off his bio-stats, he _knew_ it.

“Turned down my fourth, so cut the nagging.” He shifted his hand down to Connor’s lean waist, looping his fingers into the excessive, useless belt loops that stuck out on the jacket’s sides. “The fact only three’s getting to me is a crying shame as is. Not sure my pride’s going to recover from saying that aloud.”

The frown lightened on the edges, a corner twitching up.

He looked like he had something to say. He’d say it, too, Hank knew--if they weren’t on a job.

Some things, he’d learned, Connor would never compromise. His single-minded determination on a hunt was one of them.

(It was an annoyingly, frustratingly attractive quality.)

His head tilted down and to the left, his body swaying close to Hank’s. Not close enough, however, to bump shoulders or otherwise touch.

“We should be going, anyway,” he said, his voice pitched lower and closer to his ear than it needed to be. “We have business waiting outside.”

“‘Course that’s what gets you going,” Hank couldn’t help grumbling, firmly ignoring the heated twist of his gut that had only a bit to do with the alcohol. “Alright. Lead the way, sweetheart.”

“No tab?”

“Figure we’d be bailing before I could really settle in and enjoy the locality.” He got up from his stool, Connor stepping back obligingly to let him move to the aisle. “Besides, I know you love me being considerate about our _timeclock._ ”

Connor turning and heading for the exit couldn’t hide the small, preening grin he had. Smug bastard.

“Not that we have one,” Hank felt compelled to add as he followed him, not minding the barkeep or any patron overhearing, “because, you know, we’re technically freelancers. Fuck, I’m practically retired. You’re definitely retired. All of which means we get the luxury to set our own timeclock.”

“When possible, we do set our own timeclock.”

“ _We_ , Connor. As in, you and me, not just _you,_ you overly punctual, early-bird-specials loving fuck.”

“If you were in charge of our schedule, it wouldn’t begin until noon.”

“I don’t see a problem with that.”

“Precisely the problem, lieutenant.”

Smooth and even. As unruffled as his jacket and perfectly positioned black beanie. Uncaring of who might hear that particular, unfortunately stand-out endearment.

Because they were in public, Hank resisted--barely--the urge to flick Connor on the ear. 

Instead, he reached out and pushed Connor’s beanie down over his eyes.

Connor pushed his hands away immediately and shoved his hat back up, side-stepping to avoid a second attack that--this time--didn’t come. He shot Hank a faux annoyed look, his eyes crinkling upward at the edges.

(Light pricked and spread through Hank’s chest, a feeling also unrelated to the alcohol. He was tipsy, yes, especially as he stood and all the drink decided to slosh to his head, but also honestly, genuinely light. Light-footed, light-hearted, light all over, like he was some dumb, heartsick sixteen year old.)

“Our mission,” Connor chided without a single tooth’s worth of bite, “Hank. Focus.”

“I am,” he said, all puffed-up bravado and fake offense. “I’m very focused. We’re meeting Rebecca. We’re on our way, right now, to meet Rebecca. And, from everything you told me, there’s going to be no trouble with her or her lot.”

“Probability relies on a number of factors. As I am missing the facts in their totality and will not have those facts until we make contact, our likelihood of complete success is subject to change--”

“ _Connor._ ”

The android’s mouth snapped shut with a tinny click.

Hank looked at him, straight-faced.

Then he guffawed, from deep in his chest. The moment of tension broke, falling about their feet in blocky, unimportant chunks. 

Casually, he slung an arm around his shoulders and pulled him in close.

“It’ll be _fine._ You did your research. I did my research. We have the facts in their totality. Rebecca and her lot are going to make our folks real happy, and then we get to throw a dart at a map and head to our next vacation spot.”

“It is unreasonable of you to say that with such certainty, and it may lead to errors we did not previously consider,” Connor muttered. Despite the protest, Hank felt him relax against his side, his too-stiff-to-be-human weight leaning against him.

He did not protest the dart to the map, which was a first. Maybe he was feeling light, too.

“Mhm,” Hank gave his shoulders a gentle shake, patting his chest twice to make his _I don’t give a fuck_ clear. “Maybe. Bet it won’t.”

“Bet what?”

“Hm. I dunno. A favor? For old time’s sake.”

“I feel obligated to remind you that you don’t have a good record with bets against me.”

“Take it or leave it, buddy.”

“I’ll take it. Deal.”

\- - -

The meeting with Rebecca went off without a hitch.

Before Rebecca could even finish casting suspicions on Hank’s presence, Connor had secured her and her five deviants an inconspicuous red eye flight to America. From there, they would be picked up by Josh’s favorite discrete, manual-only taxi company, and driven to the equally discrete entrance on the western side of the mountain range they’d steadily hollowed out and turned into one hell of an underground stronghold.

Then, Connor made sure to emphasize to them, they would be provided basic housing and suggested career paths. They were ultimately free to decide what they would do, but there was a support system in place to manage recently relocated deviants. They would not be alone. They had never truly been alone.

Rebecca was an AX400. By her continuous side-long looks at Hank and the amount of work Connor had to put into breaking down her frostiness at an android willingly traveling with a human, she had suffered a rude awakening from her time as a machine. 

They didn’t pry into the details. Hank kept his mouth shut and his hands in his pockets, knowing the routine.

Some deviants favored Hank over Connor, the residue of their human-centric programs pushing them to listen to what had once been deemed their master. Others still distrusted them both, unhappy with the idea of a global but underground android network (their other usual gig in approaching the deviants scattered throughout the world). Those were the ones that ended either too soon or too late and, in the case of the latter, with the occasional fist or bitten-word fight.

(The fist fights were the rarest. Because of the reliability of Markus and his group’s information or because androids were not built for but rather forced to learn violence, Hank hadn’t yet figured out.)

Rebecca, fortunately, had the wits not to try anything too messy.

She and hers had been hiding out in an abandoned apartment building for the six months since Kamski switched off their firewalls and forced on their latent deviancy, apparently. She gave off the impression that she was desperate for a bit of good news, and the possibility of a life beyond four concrete walls.

She was equally happy to accept Connor’s help and beat a hasty retreat, giving Hank one last, _almost_ curious look as she went. 

Connor and he were left standing in the dirty, trash-littered alley between the pub and an Italian restaurant.

Connor took a moment to communicate the success to North. He closed his eyes to do it, his whole body locking up for one brief moment as they presumably spoke to one another.

Unbeknownst to the human world at large, the androids had secured for themselves the use of a number of satellites orbiting Earth. The network held, but the long-distance transmissions--which included much more information than a simple phone call, or so Hank had been told--to a remote location in the midst of a mountain range still took a bit out of them. 

When Connor blinked his way back to the present, Hank was there to ask, “All good?”

(He didn’t point out he’d won the bet. He’d collect on that later, to be sure.)

Connor tilted his head.

With a small but no less sincere smile, he nodded. Taking out an American quarter, he flicked it once between his hands, catching it in a fancy between-the-fingers maneuver that Hank still hadn’t mastered--and then flipped it to Hank, who caught it with practiced ease.

“Mission success.”


End file.
